Theoretical Elaborations And Practical Applications

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Theoretical Elaborations And Practical Applications

The complexity of democratic society means that broad theoretical reconfiguration of its founding institutions - Reason, individuality, capitalism, community, popular rule, parliament and elites, equality, etc - generates many further theoretical considerations and probably many more practical applications of theory for required social change.

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TAMWORTH FREEDOM WEEK LAUNCH

Week 12-18 September 2021 - Out of Lockdown

LAUNCH SECTIONS:

1. Achieving democracy is easier than it looks
2. The decline of parliamentary democracy - 2021
3. Moral disciplines of democratic religion
4. Capitalist democracy: pay for it, own it

1. ACHIEVING DEMOCRACY IS EASIER THAN IT LOOKS

I better start by saying that most of the following is based on my book Towards Democracy which I'll start to publicise when I've got a cover and an ISBN for it, and get the Shop here cleaned up.

If you're here from my Facebook page, you'll understand why I'll jump straight in and say Trump has shown us how easy it is to get to democracy because he's already taken us there with Promises Made Promises Kept. He has given us democracy through popular rule in a crude, but classical form. Folk who follow US politics will remember the promises - out of  Transpacific Partnership Trade Deal, of Paris Climate Accord, of Iran nuclear deal, build the southern Border Wall, lower corporate taxes, Drain the Swamp, fake media, cut red tape, a general US reduction in international commitment like military, and quite a few others. Of the big ones I've mentioned he honoured them all as best he could, despite things like congressional obstruction with the Wall. Overwhelmingly Promises Made Promises Kept. 


                      They elected a different kind of President


If folks are reacting to this by saying that the policies were defective, as I would have reacted for most of my life if I wasn't of Trump's party, we need to consider whether what is important is our individual judgement of the soundness of the policies or the fact that Trump ran on them and won the election, need to consider it if we support democracy and value our freedom. But in any case, the policies appear to have been more than sufficiently successful by the standards we use to evaluate government. The corporations came back to the US and brought their jobs with them, so unemployment including black unemployment hit record lows, the conditions of less well off Americans were improved, the US economy booming, Trump kept his promise to bring troops home from arenas like Syria, apparently had good success brokering Middle East peace deals, as far as they went, and seems to have earned the love or at least the loyalty of the Middle American "flyover states" that elected him. He passed one measure against lobbying to begin draining the swamp, but that was presumably in the nature of it more of a second term project. He exposed the fakery and bias of the media in a way from which it seems unlikely to recover without fundamental change. That's described in Towards Democracy. We hear talk of Trump's autocratic attitude, people meaning beyond what the Constitution confers, but political party dominance of the media, national protest and street violence, and support of the protofascist postmodernist critical thinking, common fascist signs, all came from the other side of politics, against Trump. I've veered off from Trump's policies to his approach and personality, but the main point about that is the same as with the policies; if you think his personality is more important than his having won the election and kept his promises, you may need to ask yourself whether you value democracy. I think democratic societies are quiet, calmly analysing affairs, in preparation for the next election, whatever the media may think. My view of Trump's value is he was a wake-up call to democracy. As far as I can see, you can't be that, and be cast in the established mould of the presidents who brought democracy to the point where it needed a wakeup call. Trump was different, and there seems to have been a quandary for some Americans about whether to accept him because their fellow citizens had elected him even though he was different. Gee, everyone's entitled to their own opinion, aren't they? 

                                       The Significance of Trump

                                     


The kind of person Trump was is important I think in understanding his significance. He wasn't, from my observation, the democratic theorist J S Mill was - but who is - nor the societal analyst Marx was - but who is? But I think Trump showed a genius of his own in recognising that the farmers and the factory workers of Middle America and the rust belt were getting left behind, an instinct that leaving a class behind was unAmerican and bad for democracy, and, especially significant here, a sense of the classical simplicity of democracy where the people rule by voting for governing policy platforms. It was radical in that today you see very little of this, perhaps more of it in Australia than in the US. Malcolm Turnbull was a mandate prime minister in a more modest but similar way to Trump, even to the point where he favoured company tax cuts to lift the economy, and stuck to them, despite media and Senate opposition. Turnbull committed another sin in the same vein - he persisted in asking the people what they thought about the policy on gay marriage, doing his postal survey when Labor blocked the promised referendum in the Senate, which then actually had a few people saying "Gee, maybe we could ask the people about other things". Turnbull actually had other resonance with Trump. Trump the narcissist may have been the only president so full  of himself that he felt comfortable about sharing his power with the people. Turnbull, "arrogant" to his detractors, was a similarly narcissistic  PM who uniquely adhered to mandate. More important though related, Turnbull, consistent with Obama's description of Trump as "not ideological", had no orthodox ideology. It was widely held that he could have been a Liberal or Labor PM, and with him supporting gay marriage and a Republic "against the Queen" why not? "No ideology" terrifies the leadershippers. Turnbull had to be sacked, by the media above all. He recounts his conversation with Rupert Murdoch in his book, A Bigger Picture (p 627). And so with Trump. Trump's was the more sweeping governing program, and even if he hadn't declared the media fake, maybe just ignoring it like Turnbull, Trump posed to the media the threat that if the people are setting policy, the power, the personal prominence of journalists, the profit and audience ratings of the media, are all threatened. 


So, we have a simple Trumpian democratic vision of the people ruling through their vote as the Enlightenment and French Revolutionaries envisaged, ruling as equals, which Trump's vision also encompassed. President Biden, by contrast, ran on a vague idea that he'd do something about global warming, though in the TV debate he didn't know what what he'd be doing about the oil and coal industries or fracking. No Australian Prime Minister or US President has offered the people such a comprehensive policy platform, so clearly promised, as Trump. That meant the elites had to get rid of Trump. Yet at the same time, Trump was just going back to democratic basics, and people understood that. That made him more of a threat. He was outside the establishment of the Republican and Democrat parties. It couldn't be much clearer that the people thought there was a problem with their democracy. Elite alarm over Trump. The other political bolt from the blue of the 21st century, the Democrats' Bernie Sanders, could also claim to have policies courtesy of his book Where We Go From Here, though whether they would become promises like Trump's is another matter.  If Trump supporters are sceptical of the Republican Party establishment, that seems nothing compared to Bernie's supporters' disgust with the Democrat establishment; they're almost as disgusted as Bernie. 


                                 Generally Weak Policy Platforms


I don't think Bernie's democratic socialism is the answer, neither does the Democrat establishment, nor the American people, for the time being, who evidently prefer Trump's job creation to welfare, as I do. For all the Democrat-media sponsored sponsored Black Lives Matter protest and riot in 48 US cities, Trump was probably in the end also a political victim of COVID, with media help. A presidential approach of playing down the danger of the bug to avoid panic is completely hostile to the media's generic interest in talking up any public threat. Apart from hostility to Trump, those sales and ratings have to be maintained by the MUTHAS 

(Media Unelected Talking Heads and Scribes). What makes Trump's clear cut and extensive insertion of          

policy mandating into the system more extraordinary is that it was as much from the blue as him, achieved outside any functional institution of governing policy development in consultation with the people. In Australia Labor under Bill Shorten offered a limited number of policies in the 2019 election, about tax on share profits and investment properties, as well as Labor's usual public spending. While it's hard to know how much in the media commentary is general hostility to mandated policy, especially conservative media with Labor, it does look like the policies were hastily ill-designed to hit the wrong people. Shorten's answer to a reporter's question about the cost of Labor's global warming policy was "That's a dumb question", which probably both cost him the election and makes my point here. We still don't have a figure. Morrison's conservative Liberal-National Coalition won on no new policies. PMs Hawke and Turnbull once or twice "flew policy kites" to test reaction, but the main dialogue between parliamentarians and the people is through media opinion polls mostly showing that the people disapprove of the prime minister, which they would when they have no say in how he governs. That disapproval helps the media keep the government in line. This century, most PMs have been sacked by their parties for poor opinion polling even though elected by the people, though some have actually lost elections.  

  Refining Policy Mandating - Voter Policy  Mandate.

Following Trump's lead here, we can therefore imagine popular rule through policy mandating more sophisticated than Trump's relatively crude instrument - a crudity which all multiple policy mandating has shared. That lies in the problem with policy platforms that the people have to vote up all the policies or none. The problem is easily enough solved, and in the 2019 Australian federal election CODE advanced "Voter Policy Ranking" in the electorate of New England, which five of the eight candidates (actually 7 - one was incommunicado) agreed to take back to their organisations for considerations, some indicating immediate support for it. The people ruling democracy remains quite a popular idea, amusing though that sounds. I have since modified Voter Policy Ranking to Voter Policy Mandate, a simpler policy rating process. But as with the ranking process, voters would register to get policy statements from the parties through the Australian Electoral Commission and indicate on a separate ballot paper on election day which policies of their preferred party they supported, or supported most, probably up to a certain number. It might involve registered voters reading 60 pages of policy explanation in the election year, but they'd be getting it from the parties not the media. Folks I've asked about taking it on say they would. If, initially, one in 15 voters registered for VPM, that would provide a vastly stronger popular mandate for particular policies than anything now available, and other folk would soon realise that their vote could be similarly empowered.  

Mandating Transformation

This simple measure, in which CODE may or may not have anticipated Promises Made Promises Kept, I can't recall, would by itself evidently be transformative of politics in the democracies. Partisan division would give way to greater bilateralism. The extent of public support for policies rated strongly on the losing side would be clear, even though not mandated by election victory. What underlies this is that, assuming, whether by choice or regulation, parties only listed twenty policies for an election, apart from ones that were already bilateral like Border Security (in Australia), it would be very risky for either major party not to include some policy on Education, on Health, on climate change. So you'd have a situation where if the Liberals won, with their schools policy only rated 11th in the national count, rated by 150,000 out of a million, but Labor's schools policy was ranked third, rated by 380,000 out of a million, Labor would have a case even though it lost for the Coalition to move a bit closer to its position. Negotiation between the parties would increasingly replace ideological slanging, that negotiation possibly including the mechanics of obtaining the most informative view of public thinking. A serious policy development function would begin to transform the parties from their present state where the main ability demanded of many parliamentarians is factional loyalty. CODE envisages the media working for elected representatives to conduct a proper dialogue between them and the people, as well as in its  current role of independent critical analysis. With this measure of rule by the people in collaboration with their representatives, the people might stop despising their government, since they were it. Democracy might survive.    

The Necessary Democratic Apparatus      The simple measure of Voter Policy Mandate refining democratic basics which Trump has already demonstrated is just one way of illustrating that progress towards democracy is in a sense easy. Another important thing to recognise is that to make a pretence of democracy convincing to the people, you have to have all of the apparatus of democracy visibly established. In this rushed launch I won't detail this, but we can see at a glance that in Australia, if the Federal government was free from obstruction by our Senate and overrule by our absurdly numerous States, and if the US President was free from Congressional obstruction, both nations could with possibly little other change be democratically governed by popular mandate. We even know that these obstructions of our governing House of Representatives and the US President are partisan abuse of the respective constitutions. Tom Paine, the US 18th century author of Rights of Man, said the US Senate was a deception. Yet remarkably, even without abolishing Australia's Senate and States, a governing program of policy mandated by the people might itself have the credibility to force Australian's Senate and States to let the House of Representatives govern, and the POTUS likewise. The media would have to consider whether to fight for its own power against the people at the risk of continued loss of credibility.  
 

Policy versus Person and Party

What follows from this proposal of Voter Policy Mandate and the effects described  is clearly a greater emphasis on policy in politics and voting as opposed to persons and parties. I think I have already suggested that the nervousness of the parties about policy is very much about their being left free to govern for themselves and their paymasters rather than the people. Trump provides perhaps an historic best example of a President attacked personally, because his opposition Democrats did not want a democratic discourse turning around policy. That would be both because they might lost the debate about the soundness of Trump's policy and because in principle turning government around policy is a shift from elite power towards popular power. President Biden looks to provide an historic example of party over both person and policy, I did tweet last year that Democrats would vote for Biden if he were dead. and as at 17th September 2021 there would be Trumpist wags who would say I had not been far wrong. But there are serous sides to this. Biden was little visible during the election campaign, less visible than President Obama, and there is a valid concern that this was a deception of the people, a manoeuvre to conceal Biden's inarticulateness so Democrats would vote for him. I have just watched President Biden fomenting anger against Americans who don't want to be COVID vaccinated on the part of their fellow Americans. I can't recall a President speaking in that way to the people. The other serious side is that the Democrats operate on some kind of pecking order which enables a 79-year-old to lead their presidential aspirations against any challenge from younger leadership in the party. The problem with votes for party is that it implies voting for ideology, ideology being typically a meaningless diversion from rational pragmatic consideration of issues such as they would receive under popular rule. Ideology typically introduces prior assumptions about how to deal with issues which can distort rational consideration virtually to the point of its complete exclusion. In practice, it seems always to be pragmatism which provides the best government.  Governing decisions in Australia by Labor under Hawke and Keating to deregulate trade and currency and by the Liberal Howard to impose the biggest modern tax in the Goods and Services Tax illustrate the kind of reversals which make ideology irrelevant to sound government. A shift to policy pragmatism would be away from party voter bases who reflexively vote regardless of the quality of candidate or policy, this ensuring the poor quality of elite party government. Ideology is popularly divisive elite leadershipping rubbish.  

The Multiple Problem of Missing Its Single Solution. 

All the complications I have described establish themselves in preventing the people from ruling because the people do not rule. The different forms of elite rule of society in place of popular rule make reforming society for popular rule look complex, when the simple way to reform is for the people to assume rule. How can we deal with a media that exercises a greater, though unelected power, over government, than the people do in their own right at elections? Take rule. How can we deal with the abuse of the Senate's and Congress' "checks and balances" which prevents the people ruling? Take rule. How can we improve the quality of representatives whose corruption and incompetence prevents them from governing effectively on behalf of the people? Take rule. What do we do with the ideological divisions which lock the people into hostile partisan bases and deny them the unity they need to rule? Take rule. The whole complication of reforming society is just because in the absence of popular rule this elite has grabbed its slice of the ruling power, that elite its slice, and so on. But they aren't all separate problems. They are one problem, the problem of what happens when the people don't rule. How do we eliminate the rule of the wealthy and their minions, the universities, the media, the parties, to name three, in place of popular rule? Take rule. 

The People Govern (a bit)

There is no need to be too conspiratorial about this, in the sense of alleging that elites conspired in person to bring about this hijacking of democracy. Paul Simon's "loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires and baby these are the days of miracle and wonder" in "The Boy in the Bubble" seems to me salutary. In crude and perhaps speculative terms, maybe as much in theory as ever in practice, we can see that the French Revolutionary idea of popular rule, the aristocrats decapitated, the Church excommunicated, the "corporations" dissolved, never actually came to pass. The king's head was still rolling when the French, for necessary reasons, elected an Emperor. The "left" claims of popular rule by the Third Estate, a rule that did not challenge private property, were clear enough in theory, but only in theory. Enter "laissez-faire" and "small government". No, the traditional powers said, the people weren't really going to rule everything at all, because the government, through which the people ruled, was better to stay out of things, stay small, and just let things sort themselves out, laissez-faire. And small government can look like a great idea, because big government can be a meddling monster - when the people don't rule. The art, which is what it is, of knowing exactly where and how government should apply authority and where leave matters to the people to deal with, will be one that the people and their representatives need to master in democracy. But small government simply meant small popular power, while other interests grabbed the rest of the power in society. These considerations have been both laudatory and critical of Marx, CODE saying among other things that his idea of a proletarian dictatorship dictatorship - his or Engels'- was bad in theory as well as in communist practice. But Marx's other equally fundamental idea, that we don't have to have a society where however things turn out must be right because that's "natural", but rather can use human intelligence to devise the best form of society, with the Revolution's Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, was sound, and what was favourably "left" about Marx. The Third Estate that sat on the left in the National Assembly were just people, not socialists.  


Elites' Fascist Response?

I'm opening new theoretical doors, so this reflection needs to close. The answer I'm proposing to popular impotence  is for the people to demand policy commitments and Voter Policy Mandate to use them to construct a governing program, with the other implications indicated. Would the ruling wealth and its institutional instruments, media, universities, parliament and Congress, opt for force and fascism rather than hand over its rule to the people? I support COVID vaccination, but from President Biden's authoritarian approach to anti-vaxxers, the fear of fascism has gained ground, providing confirmation of exactly the conspiracy theory that underpins much anti-vax sentiment, totalitarian mind control or something. It's not the first sign of fascism in Biden's comments. For example:

"As president, I will send a clear, unequivocal message to the entire nation: there is no place for hate in America. 

It will be given no licence. It will be given no oxygen. It will be given no safe harbour."

(Tweet by Joe Biden 7th October 2020).

I don't think the sufferers from Trump Derangement Syndrome were who he had in mind. Even some of them may not like the government controlling how they feel. We do take a little comfort from Joe's not seeming to know quite what he's saying, but the American people are not going to surrender their guns. I'm guessing that rather than attack each other, vaxxers against anti-vaxxers, they'd unite against their President, achieving Biden's ludicrously hypocritical professed goal of unity. And I don't think the captains of free enterprise want to become cogs in Albert Speer's machinery of Hitler's National Socialism. But a stronger soft fascism like Putin's remains a worry. 

18th September 2021


2. DECLINE OF PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY - 2021

The second part of the Freedom Week launch - now well after that week ended - is an interrogation of our parliamentary and Congressional democratic systems. That means as they are at September 2021, ie, without popular rule - without Voter Policy Mandate or other CODE measures like Same Party Recall and National Constituency Members of Parliament to strengthen popular rule. 

Popular Confidence in Democracy

My concern with this goes back to my 2015 State Parliament candidature on a Party Reform platform that included party rank and file membership election of party leader, public funding of elections, general democratisation. In the course of that I came  across the 2012 Lowy Institute survey which found that support for democracy as the best system was at 39% among 18-29 year olds, the voters of tomorrow. At November 2020 the overall support for democracy was at 71%, the highest level in the 17 years of the survey, and thus up from support in the 60 percents historically. In the 2020 survey preference for democracy among 18-29 year olds had risen to 61%. 

The first thing that needs to be said about these numbers is that they are hopeful. It would be worse for democracy if the young and overall figures had stayed around 40 and 60 percent respectively. Beyond that, interpretation is difficult. Since Australian Prime Minister Howard lost to Mr Rudd, every PM has been removed from office by their party - Rudd, Gillard, Abbott, Turnbull - except current PM Morrison, all the others paying the penalty for poor public opinion polling. Only Rudd was also removed by losing an election. The historical period over which I've considered the survey has evidently been one of unprecedented popular dissatisfaction with prime ministers - unprecedented in the nation's history. Perhaps PM Morrison's popularity is a COVID effect. But the media, especially Mr Murdoch's NewsCorp media, will be reluctant to sack another PM. More to the point, dissatisfaction with prime ministers can only superficially be seen as dissatisfaction with democracy. They aren't the same thing. 

I say the numbers are hopeful, but their negative interpretation isn't hard. People will wonder what in 2020 nearly 30% of Australians and 40% of 18-29 year olds have in mind as preferable to democracy. It may be concerning that these numbers are a 17 year record, or not concerning, if they continue to trend upwards. What, then, of the public's opinion poll dissatisfaction with our prime ministers? If disaffection with prime ministers isn't the same as disaffection with with democracy, can we say that the people have increasingly supported "real democracy" as distinct from what we've got? I'd say that, because CODE is very much about changing democracy, a sick democracy, for the better - that's my bias. But there is further support for the idea the idea that people support democracy as an abstract system, "in theory", as distinct from its present form. That's as simple as the fact that people dislike politicians generally, yet on the survey figures support democracy. That would be related as I take it to when you ask people if they rule the democracy, they say "No", even if you qualify it by "You, as part of a ruling people?" "No". 

I haven't asked that many people, but I did do a fifty person survey in Tamworth on the sacking of PM Abbott on 14th September 2015 for No More Blah Restore Our Vote, which was to become the first CODE book, still a good quick read I think. I'm surprised at the strength of the question I asked about the sacking of the PM. Disapproval of that sacking got the equal highest score, 19 out of 49; "system functioning normally and acceptably" scored 11. But I'd forgotten that the disapproval question didn't just say "Don't like removal of prime minister" but went on "and will consider voting against this government (ie for someone other than Barnaby Joyce) because of it". I'd forgotten that people were so angry about it that it could change their vote. Barnaby, I distinctly recall, opposed the sacking.

So, bias or not, I can go with the idea that people supporting democracy as the best system, yet feeling that the shamocracy we have now needs improving to make it the best system, run simultaneously and parallel. "Improving" in fact would mean "stop it declining"; I don't think there's a problem with accepting that if the present form of democracy needs improving to at least make people satisfied that they have in practice something like the best system with politicians they respect and admire, democracy is likely to be declining.

Photo by fred-moon

That system decline, or, more optimistically, recession, is the subject of the rest of this section, and there isn't much doubt about it. I can't spend much time speculating. One way you can look at, however, is certainly that people have been persuaded not so much that democracy is better, as that the alternatives are worse. That would give the same Lowy survey result. My explanation of improved support for democracy as a system began with ISIS. They wanted a global caliphate, and I think that a few executions on the telly may have convinced people that wasn't a great idea. So there was terrorism related to that, and the Taliban in Afghanistan. In 2014 there was the downing of flight MH17 in the eastern Ukraine, allegedly by Russia. So Putin's dictatorship may have come down in our estimation with that. There were 38 Australians on board. The China menace may be too recent for the 2020 survey, but Trump's meeting with Kim Jong-Un drew attention to the North Korean tyranny and its missile testing nuclear war capability. This effect of greater awareness of the unsatisfactory alternatives to democracy just seems to take us to Churchill's observation that democracy is the worst possible system apart from all the others.

I'm anticipating our look at global democratic decline, but we probably need to consider the little fragments we have in relation to that. But if, from 2012, Australians have realised that other systems are worse than democracy, if democracy has declined in Australia as it has globally, you'd think that Australians would have to be aware of that and feel that. And there's reason that may well be true - that as support for democracy in theory rose, support for its form here in practice fell. It would be like the more people saw democracy damaged in practice, the more they thought "Hang on, this is the best system we're going to get". Only miss the light when it's burning low. The only prime ministerial sacking by 2012 was Rudd. It looked like a oncer, a blip on the screen. By 2020 it was an institution, with the people quite rightly feeling that their increasingly preferred system in theory was being corroded in practice. The sackings were quite consistent with an actual decline in democracy, and people's perception of that. In the US, some people may have thought Trump's win in 2016 a setback for democracy. But he won on the anti-corruption platform of Drain The Swamp, the only president I can recall doing that. It looks like a lot of Americans thought they were supporting democracy - again, as it should be - by electing Trump to stop its continuing degradation - as it was. So, surprise. Democracy is complex. As support for it as the best system goes up, democracy can in practice decline. back to Only miss the Sun when it starts to snow. 

Commentary of Democratic Decline

I've done a bit of analysis of a survey and some recent history, mainly Australian, but I think it's necessary to glance at media and scholarly commentary on democracy. The books being written and media analysis say consistently that democracy is declining. The books I've got that say this include Pope Francis' 2015 encyclical letter Laudato Si' Care for our common home, The Demons of Liberal Democracy by Adrian Pabst, and I would have to add Mark Latham's Diaries, which record why he had to give up on the major party he once led, Labor, because of the political failings be perceived in it as a democratic party. The scholarly perception of democratic decline goes way beyond that few books of mine. Now journalists like Paul Kelly on The Australian write feature articles that are compilations of summaries of books questioning the health of democracy. In media analysis we commonly find democracy described in terms like "sclerotic". 

My notion that being able to find confirmation of my concerns the day I happen to be writing about them adds weight to them is well applied here. I read yesterday as I wrote this, 19th September 2021, in the Weekend Australian, David Kilkullen:

"A stark realisation of US weakness and decline". 

This was in relation to the AUKUS military pact, not directly to the Afghanistan withdrawal. How the weakness referred to could nor reflect on US democracy escapes me. I'll come back to the military aspect of this. The 21-22 August Weekend Australian is on the Afghanistan withdrawal. Paul Kelly weighs in with:

"...a fog of doubt about Biden himself and about America's democratic sustenance as a great power". 

In the same edition we read, in relation to the Australian Press Council's woke racisming:

"The standards, values and freedoms delivered by the enlightenment and developed by Western liberal democracies, and defended by the blood and treasure of their citizens over centuries, have been overturned on the whim of unaccountable virtue signallers." 

That from Chris Kenny. Kilkullen again in the September 11-12 Australian:

"Twenty years after 9/11 the terrorism threat is larger and more widespread, the Western alliance is weaker, and the US is in sharp decline relative to its rivals. Democratic societies are less free, stunted by 'safetyism', less resilient and more divided."

jJanet Albrechtsen comments in the September 18-19 2021 Australian on judicial activism, a federal minister having bounced a judge's decision:

"Those not cheering must have little interest in the proper workings of a healthy democracy. The charitable explanation is their emotion has blinded them to the dangers of activists using courts as tools in a global program of democratia interruptus."

We know the role the media plays in the very things it complains of. It can still publish valid concerns.  

The Global Democracy Indices

Democracy is much measured and studied around the world. An example of this is from Freedom House, the document I've looked at "Democracy under Siege", by Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz. It's a useful document, for its information, and for what it tells us about the problems with democracy between its  lines rather than on them. The global diagnosis of democracy, following a list of the forms of growing repression, seems to be a consensus position:

"These withering blows marked the 15th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. The countries experiencing deterioration outnumbered those with improvements by the largest margin recorded since the negative trend began in 2006. The long democratic recession is deepening .....

Nearly 75 percent of the world's population lived in a country that faced deterioration last year. The ongoing decline has given rise to claims of democracy's inherent inferiority. Proponents of this idea include official Chinese and Russian commentators seeking to strengthen  their international influence while escaping accountability for abuses, as well as antidemocratic actors within the democratic states who see an opportunity to consolidate power. They are both cheering the breakdown of democracy and exacerbating it, pitting themselves against the brave groups and individuals who have set out to reverse the damage."  (p 2)

There is no need to question the information here, since the authors are keen to defend democracy. Democracy is at least in long recession. But the proponents of democracy's inferiority evidently don't include the writers in the Western tradition referred to in this quote from Isaac Kramnick's Introduction to Tocqueville's Democracy in America

"America was proof that the democratic spirit did not necessarily degenerate into anarchy and disorder as writers in the Western tradition ever since Plato had predicted." (p xxv) 

Though what would Plato know about dem ...? Oh, right. One of the things about democracy and its supporters is that democracy has long been exempt from self-criticism, automatically assigned the high moral ground, in whatever form it took, without question whether that form corresponded to democracy's superior claims. Did it exemplify Equality? Fraternity? Liberty? And there look to be very clear reasons why the two authors here are not going to start that questioning. Apparently, they know the real motives of the Chinese and Russians in their wrong-headed criticism of democracy, and also see through the villainy of the internal enemies of democracy, opposed by its brave defenders, which could possibly include themselves. These authors know a way to certainty. A three-line opinion on Facebook with none of Freedom House's global authority would not influence them, but I'll quote it since I got it 20 minutes ago:

"Yes, Stan, the United States is in a desperate spiral of incpompedance."   

 I did warn Chick that I'd use his coinage. But we'll see in a moment where our authors go.

Democracy under Siege goes on to informatively illustrate democratic decline in nations all around the world. But Freedom House appears to have been colonised by the Woke, who naturally project a perspective of everything about democracy being OK, as I take it because they think they own the democracy such as it now is, and think that not without justification. The media-Democrat party-university cartel in the US is considered by many ascendant, no doubt inclusive of its election of President Biden. That they think democracy is OK, at the same time as they document its foundering around the world, will not trouble these authors. Silly other countries. The authors sum up their perspective concisely, but more revealingly than they realise:

"The enemies of freedom have pushed the false narrative that democracy is in decline because it is incapable of addressing people's needs. In fact, democracy is in decline because its most prominent exemplars are not doing enough to protect it." (p 6)

So there. Let's hope those exemplars don't act - or fail to - from ulterior motives. The authors speak from a nation where the richest 1 percent of folk own 34 percent of the national wealth, and the poorer 50 percent of the people own 2 percent of the national wealth. So we just have to hope Freedom House authors are in the better off 50 percent. It's the usual Woke dogmatism, the reference to narratives failing to convey to the authors that the narratives have diverged, it thus now being a problem in the domain of opinion or interpretation beyond fact and formal logic to confidently say "This happened". What the failure to acknowledge that divergence means cannot as I take it  be seen as simply the Woke determination to consolidate a single narrative, their own. The document thus presents as an unintentionally eloquent testimony to the deterioration of democracy. The prevalent beliefs are formed arbitrarily by emotional leaps of faith to certainty. Naturally the authors are scathing about Trump, in the usual ways which in the context of their paper imply that democracy is fine but for Trump. Never mind that half the United States embraces an opposite narrative, evidently lacking mystical inspiration, and that what the Woke might consider radicalism appears as a paralysingly myopic conservatism: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". That words and pictures no longer reliably meet the need of current circumstances that demand deeds of conciliatory effect expressing good faith doesn't get on the screen.     

The authors' penultimate paragraph probably sums up the problem as well as anything:

"The Biden administration has pledged to make support for democracy a key part of US foreign policy, raising hopes for a more proactive American role in reversing the global democratic decline. To fulfil this promise, the president will need to provide clear leadership, articulating his goals to the American public and to allies overseas."

In September 2021, with the Taliban back ruling Afghanistan, and the smoke of the withdrawal still in the air, the authors seem to speak from a dream world.  This goes beyond the substance of their hopes, even to their use of the word "articulating". It's just unconsciousness of an unfortunate word, that might make us wonder whether it didn't jar on the authors because they see a different President Biden. But the whole thing raises the underlying worry about emotionally inspired arbitrary belief in the postmodernist basis of Woke "critical thinking" . How much contemporary analysis is now cognate with things like Derrida's "idea of justice"?         photo by michele-henderson

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"... without calculation and without rules, without reason and without rationality. And so we can recognise in it... identify a madness. And perhaps a sort of mystique." (Quoted in Wolin, R, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism. p 238)

Reading Woke research is eerily like reading the newspaper, lots of useful information, but the analysis and political conclusion bent around ideology. This would not concern the Woke however, since postmodernism would deny the idea of objectivity in their thinking, or, arbitrarily, of anything but its own, postmodernist, validity. And being compared to the media would be the least of Woke worries. The US media is largely Woke.

I should say outright then that I am dealing here with two different kinds of concern. The democracy indices' concern is that democracy is declining. CODE's concern is why. They're related of course, the concerns of CODE analysis being corroborated by the fact of decline measured by the indices. CODE must however address both whether there are defects in democratic theory which will cause democracy to fail, and failure to apply democratic theory in practice. These can be related too. Perhaps failure to apply theory just means theoretical failure to require its application. More likely, one might think, failure of application is non-theoretical manipulation, something to which any theory about society is susceptible. At any rate, for all Repucci and Slipowitz's assertion of their views, the indices are not really concerned with whether the collapse of democracy as it now is is historically inevitable, nor how it needs to be theoretically or practically changed to avert that collapse. They are CODE concerns. A conception like democracy is a religion is remote from the indices.

Global Trends in Democracy: Background, U.S. Policy, and Issues for Congress. October 2018 

The second document I've looked at is this Congressional briefing paper. It too says much about the decline of democracy between the lines as well as on them. But in this second case what's between the lines is in no way to the discredit of the authors. I have to say that this briefing paper is to be taken more seriously overall than the Freedom House document examined above, which in itself is something encouraging between the lines about democracy. Congress is not getting Woke feelings served up to it. This material is actually based on two indices, Freedom House's and the Economic Intelligence Unit's (EIU). I think Freedom House's index has credibility separate from Sarah and Amy's interpretations.

Global Trends confirms the overall decline:

"The aggregate level of democracy around the world has not advanced for more than a decade. Analysis of data trend lines from two major global democracy indexes indicates that, as of 2017, the level of democracy around the world has not advanced since around the year 2005 or 2006... overall, this data indicates that democracy's expansion has been more challenged during this period than during any similar period dating back to the 1970s." (p 1)

The EIU has a slightly more moderate view of democratic decline - recession - than Freedom House, but its numbers seem to me worrying in more ways than just the decline it documents. This Table shows the regimes of full to basically nil democracy changed from 2006 to 2017:

Number of Countries (% of countries)

Cell

2006

2017

Full democracies

26 (16%)       

 19 (11%)

Flawed democracies     

53 (32%)   

 57 (34%)

Hybrid regimes       

33 (20%) 

 39 (23%)

Authoritarian regimes  

 55 (33%)  

 52 (31%) 

Source: EIU Democracy indexes 2006, 2017

The democratic decline in the first three rows is worrying. I also find worrying that Full Democracies have not only declined but are at 2017 only 11% of nations, down from only 16% in 2006, especially while authoritarian regimes are in the 30 %s. 11% and 16% seem a long way from democratic dominance of world government. Global Trends notes a third democracy index showing the same trend as the two analysed:

"Findings from another democracy index not analysed here, the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem), similarly show a lack of democratic progress at the global level in recent years". (p 15)

We are keeping several balls in the air in this consideration, because we must remember that the differences between the two documents we are looking at goes to what is wrong with democracy. Trump, another complication, presents here not just as "a president" to be judged as other presidents are judged, but as a wake-up call and a shake-up of democracy, that is, significant in a way distinct from the usual criterion of whether his policies worked well or not. We noted earlier in this Section that Trump was the only president to have run on a policy promise of Drain the Swamp, an apparently towering explanatory hurdle for those who wish to portray him as damaging to democracy, that is, portray by explanation other than the arbitrary emotional leap of faith. We will come back to that yet again.

Democracy: Internal Improvement and External Promotion In fact, nothing is more central than this question about Trump to the consideration here of democratic decline. Here we have the position of those who deny democracy needs to change, merely be better promoted to nations foolish enough to turn away from it, a denial we worry proceeds from their establishment self-interest, versus those who say democracy needs very seriously to consider changing, obviously Trump with his dissatisfaction with the system, thus apparently those who elected him, also CODE with its concern about practical democratic decline and theoretical flaws, apparently other defecting nations, and everyone concerned about an evident decline in democracy without being able to be sure whether it is another episodic recession or the predicted historical demise. 

The Congressional briefing paper notes:

" ... Some members of Congress and others have argued that challenges in the US political system are hampering the United States' ability to effectively project democratic values abroad. Experts point to problems such as polarisation and polarising rhetoric, institutional gridlock, and eroding respect for democratic norms as potentially undermining US democracy promotion efforts. According to Freedom House, the United States has suffered a 'slow decline' in political rights and civil liberties for several years, a deterioration that it says accelerated in 2017. The Economic Intelligence Unit (EIU) for the first time categorised the United States as a 'flawed democracy' in its report covering 2017." (pages 16 and 17) 

Photo by randy-colus

Perhaps more bluntly, the paper notes:

"Given present challenges in the US political system, some also assert that one of the best means of promoting democracy abroad is for the United States to focus on shoring up democracy at home." (p 22)

This reference in Global Trends to views contrary to those of the Freedom House paper may only be the start of the Congressional briefing paper's scepticism about Freedom House. The ambiguity of "According to Freedom House" and "a deterioration it says accelerated in 2017" is actually in context quite delicious, though we must not be distracted. We can see how the EIU categorising the US as a flawed democracy for the first time in 2017 could be confirming of the Freedom House view, even in the context of the quotation of views different from the Freedom House views we have seen. 2017 was the first Trump year. But it is far from clear how to interpret this, and interpretation is precisely what Global Trends quite rightly steers clear of. Freedom House would evidently have us blame Trump for an immediate decline in US democracy. And while he may have caused such a decline, that is not quite the same thing as his being to blame for it, amusing though that sounds. And the views about improving US democracy to better promote it give us the clue to the distinction. Those are the views about polarisation and polarising rhetoric, institutional gridlock, and disrespect for democratic norms.   And Trump may well have caused all those things, by being the president who wasn't supposed to win, by being the president promising to drain the swamp, possibly by being the president who said the media was fake, even by being the president who thought, as his supporters thought, that election made him the President, even though he was different from other presidents, quaintly democratic though that sounds.  

The media's instant hostility to the elected president may well have seen a decline in respect for democratic norms in 2017. Trump caused it all right. But quite a few people would not say he was to blame for it at all. They'd say he won an election on that policy. They'd say it was election that was disrespected, not the role of the media. They'd say it was election that was disrespected in the Russian Collusion theory that was supposedly the only way the president who wasn't supposed to win (this is General Flynn as well as me and half the US)  could have won. Trump caused it all right, but an astonishing number of people don't thing he was to blame for it at all. Why would he come up with such a theory against himself and his election? So there began the investigation by Special Counsel Mueller. Perhaps that wasn't polarisation, perhaps it was. There'll be much disagreement about that. I personally thought the investigation was OK. For six months. But then it dragged on for 18 months, the US President talking to dictators while being investigated by his own Congress. Would that have been a result of polarising partisanship? Presidency-Congress gridlock? Would calling the most investigated president in US history a criminal be polarising rhetoric? Would Trump's calling the 18 moths investigation a witch hunt have been disrespect for democratic norms or institutional gridlock between the President and Special Counsel acting for Congress? Could the impeachment that arose out of Mueller's investigation have been polarising and partisan rhetoric?  There's no doubt Trump caused them. But people who can't understand why Trump would impeach himself don't blame him for them. The impeachment failed, because 18 months of investigation produced nothing of Russian collusion, though the fishing expedition it turned into came up with some ground of impeachment few people could understand, though it may have been Trump's trying to start, not stop, start, an investigation. Oh dear, an investigation.

We are actually not supposed to remember these things, because the media relies on eighty day, if not an 80 hour or even 80 minute, recall. But the acceleration of polarisation, gridlock, disrespect for democratic norms through Trump's term won't surprise anyone. Some people will remember the protest/riot in 48 US cities before number 49 at the Capitol, real disrespect for democratic norms there, this one caused by Trump till it too turned riotous and Trump told everyone to go home. And after the Demsurrection the Dempeachment, that Trump no doubt caused. The usual from the Dems. But to be fair, also the MSMsurrection, even though CNNsurrection sounds better. And there was some nervousness on both sides of the aisle about disrespect for the Capitol, the symbol of US democracy, and perhaps the swamp. Harsh, bro.   

This narrative  - it's just a narrative - actually only scratches the surface of the problem here with Trump and democracy. The real problem for Freedom House is simple: democracy had been in slow decline since 2006. We don't need our memories for that. Amy and Sarah told us. And it looks to be a particular favour to us, and to Trump, that they further tell  us that that decline accelerated in 2017. Freedom House's difficulty is that some folks might think "Gee, if democracy had been declining for ten years, maybe it was time for someone to shake it up, with stuff like Drain the Swamp and some other critical attitudes". That just seems to make sense. And if that makes sense, it looks like the accelerated decline from 2017 was most likely caused by the same folks who had already caused a decline from 2006 resisting change. If not the same folks, the same establishment - supposed to win, swamp, Capitol, Black Lives Matter, media, Democrats the party directly threatened, but both parties, beaten by Trump to different degrees. Freedom House has got Repucci and Slipowitz saying democracy can't be considered inferior after a 15 year decline, that it's Trump's fault it got so bad, that democracy doesn't need change, but just better promotion. The problem isn't the product, for God's sake, it's the advertising, the marketing. Whereas lots of people might say, in 2016, after ten years of democratic decline, it seems fairly natural that someone looked at these other countries around the world, after ten years of democratic decline, and said that maybe something needed to be done, to change, including the people who'd been running US democracy for ten years. Who'd be, again, the likely ones to be the source of the problem. Their establishment had hurt democracy, but it sure hadn't hurt them. They were going to get rid of this disrespectfully elected apostle - oops, apostate - of change, this madman who against all reason had run his campaign against all the forces best equipped to defeat him, and, one time, won. Not twice. What a narcissist. And the worry with Slipowitz and Repucci and the Woke is that they are part of that establishment who the decline of democracy hadn't hurt at all, for all Freedom House's stewardship of democracy, but were doing very well with their university degrees and comfortable, prestigious Freedom House gig. Just another narrative. You can say Repucci and Slipowitz' position has real credibility in that Woke is the dominant political outlook in the US. And you can say, as CODE does, that that Woke dominance is a major contributing factor to the rot of US democracy that we can read between the lines of Democracy under Siege.   

photo by koshu-kunii

Which Favoured Democracy? 

Global Trends also brings us back to the position described earlier about Australia of people supporting democracy in theory, but being dissatisfied with the form of it under which they live in practice, the position acknowledged as favourable to CODE:

" ... a Pew Research Centre report summarising the 2017 polling data across a set of 38 geographically and economically diverse countries found mixed attitudes about the performance of democracy. Nonetheless, the same report indicated that support for democracy as a political system remains high, with support far exceeding most nondemocratic alternatives. A median of 78% of respondents approved of representative democracy, while more than 70% disapproved of either rule by a 'strong leader' or rule by the military. The only nondemocratic alternative to garner plurality approval was 'rule by experts'. Approximately 23% of respondents expressed support for representative democracy and rejected all three nondemocratic alternatives posed." (p 17)

The focus I am applying here in relation to CODE is the distinction as it appears in the above quote between "mixed attitudes about the performance of democracy" and "Nonetheless ..... support for democracy as a political system remains high". There doesn't seem to be any doubt that the public supports democracy in the abstract, the system, but may at the same time be deeply sceptical about how it is practised in their nation and lives. To answer the question in my heading: "Theoretical democracy". Global Trends appears to go on to make this distinction even clearer, referring to another study:

"... an analysis sought to gauge the trajectory of support for democracy across 134 countries since 1990 by statistically aggregating data from a large number of polls. The findings indicated that baseline levels of support for democracy differed between established democracies, new democracies, and nondemocracies (with levels of support generally highest within established democracies) but that recent trend lines across each type varied across countries and regions...

These varied trend lines are perhaps unsurprising given the myriad distinct political, social and economic contexts and developments within countries around the globe. Nonetheless, they may also indicate that support for democracy as a political system, at least among general publics, is not eroding to the degree that many democracy proponents fear. Rather, to the extent that public opinion polling is a reliable indicator ... support overall appears resilient to this point. This may buttress the claim, as articulated by one scholar, that 'democracy may be receding in practice, but it is still ascendant in people's values and aspirations ... few people in the world today celebrate authoritarianism as a superior moral system ... [or] the best form of government." (p 17-18)

"Moral system" of course strikes a chord here.  Global Trends continues with a section "Limitations and Caveats Around Measuring Support for Democracy", the last of the problems listed being 

"Finally, the relationship between attitudes towards democracy and the stability (or lack thereof) of democracies is not necessarily straightforward". 

As we discovered in the first part of this section  looking at Australia. It looks to me like the only difference in recognition of the distinction - and possible confusion in interpreting  opinion surveys - between support of democracy "in theory" and "in practice" is that though Global Trends expresses the problem in almost those exact terms, it doesn't quite do so. There is in effect no difference, Global Trends observing its charter of placing evidence before Congress rather than drawing its own conclusions. It is CODE's perspective - democracy needs to change its practice to align practice with theory, all the more when the theory is better developed.  

Not surprisingly, because of CODE''s more advanced democratic objectives, there is not much comfort for CODE in these findings, though that will be partly because of the distinction mentioned and the confusion it must create with opinion surveys. 78% support for representative democracy in the Pew findings first quoted looks high, but even a 22% absence of support does not sit comfortably with CODE's idea of Enlightenment democratic Fraternity and its kindred civic Equality. The complications are inescapable. With democracy malfunctioning in practice, we have to assume that support for it in theory will be to some extent lowered. That can be turned around to suggest that perhaps dysfunction in practice is not as bad as it might be. But not only is all of that speculation, but there is another reason why it is little comfort to CODE about the state of democracy. CODE needs to be far ahead of these public opinion surveys in understanding the breakdown of democracy. That the postmodernist roots of Woke politics are counter-Enlightenment, going back to an identity politics in late 18th century attempts to overturn the democratic gains of the French Revolution, like Maistre's Considerations on France, 1797, is not the stuff of public opinion surveys. I don't suppose there's any reason the authors of Global Trends couldn't point that out to Congress, with reference to Wolin's The Seduction of Unreason - The intellectual romance with fascism from Nietzsche to postmodernism. But if they included everything about present democracy at that level, their document would be quite different in nature, twenty times as long, and couldn't be called Global Trends. Put another way, if good support for democracy in theory were the same thing as theory's application in practice, we would have proper democracies at least to the extent of traditional and established theory. CODE's work would not seem so necessary or urgent. But even there we don't have the simplicity of independent variables. The reason democratic theory is not applied is because it is inadequate, including to the task of securing its application. "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance" is a start, but there is a  long way to go beyond that. Apparently what Lincoln actually said about democracy destroying itself was this, under the heading of "the perpetuation of our political institutions": 

"At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reaches us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.' 

The religious foundations of the moral system are there, but they need a lot of development. CODE, little distance from Lincoln, says that democracy must have the freedom to destroy itself, adding that there is therefore ultimately no democracy beyond the individual. I don't think that is as tough as it sounds. For years I've been concerned that most of our lives are what I would now see as existentially compromised, because we do not rule.  

The further aspect of Global Trends' treatment of support for democracy that requires comment is highlighted by the Pew research quoted, and has analytical implications beyond the facts of it, specifically for CODE. The headings under which the Pew respondents rated democratic and other regimes are a problem. The two kinds of democratic regimes offered to respondents are Representative Democracy and Direct Democracy. Again, no fault is attributed to Pew here, not to Global Trends, since their headings are reflection of the existing understanding of democracy as "Representative Democracy" and a reasonable option for it of "Direct Democracy". The problem with these headings is not just that they are misleading in that they don't adequately cover the options in the area, but that this failure may seriously influence responses, away from an appearance of democratic support. In relation to that, not only is a 22% absence of support for Representative Democracy of concern to CODE, but another regime option offered, "Rule by Experts", is considered by slightly more respondents "Good" than "Bad", 49% to 46% with a few "no responses". As I say, no fault is attributed here, because another option, that advocated by CODE, is not present on the survey or anywhere else, though the survey may be misleading on that. The missing CODE option would be Representative Government with Popular Rule. And the problem is that though this nowhere exists, it may be the option which would best have measured support for democracy. Direct Democracy, though a logical option, cannot be taken seriously in the large nation state. Even the odd cases where referenda seek direct public opinion can't be expanded to government of the nation. Even referenda are expressions of public opinion guided by representatives as they are now seen. "Direct democracy" has actually been used as a straw man historically, in the US in particular, to be knocked down to argue that the people can't really rule, an evasion of the fact that the people could only ever rule in collaboration with their representatives. But the effect of this straw manning, and of other elements of the governing apparatus, is that the members of parliament and Congress are not representatives, but more delegates, people sent to the governing houses by the people to make up their own minds about how to govern, with minimal effective accountability to the people, and little of real democracy. There is actually a principle which would claim democratic standing of parliamentary discretion which says that the people should not make governing decisions directly, but leave government to parliament. As noted, in US presidential elections, only Trump has offered the people any extensive say in government through a fairly full mandated policy platform. 

The concern here is thus that an option of "Representative Democracy in which the People Rule in collaboration with their representatives", who are thus real representatives, though such a regime doesn't exist in practice, nevertheless has decisive significance in the survey findings. For one thing, the option presented, "Representative Democracy", misnomer though it is, could be taken as the best available  approximation to proper democracy, the representative popular rule option, and because people don't consider it satisfying in operation, cause understatement of support for democracy, to the extent of reducing it to 78%. and on the other question to lower than Rule by Experts. Both the 78% figure, here seen as too low, and the Rule by Experts figure, would be an expression of general popular distaste for politics and politicians which must cause some reduction of support for democracy. There is, as noted, no support here for direct democracy, as neither feasible nor popularly desired. But without claiming certainty, CODE would suggest that the real measure of support for democracy would be for a representative-people's democracy, in which the people's dissatisfaction with politicians would be replaced by the people's sense of their own greater responsibility, a representative-people's democracy such as Trump provided in a crude form with Promises Made Promises Kept. It cannot be discounted that one of the reasons for Trump supporters' unprecedented love of a political figure was their sense of their own responsibility for how Trump governed. They were ruling kind of like in a democracy. Nor should the full implications of that love be left unstated. To the earlier religious note that there is ultimately no democracy beyond the individual should be added that the other part of the democratic bottom line is love, humane fraternity, between those individual citizens, and the trust which it seems that love alone alone can deliver. We thought institutional machinery like elections, parliaments, capitalist free enterprise, mass media and so on could replace that love and trust. Uh-uh. By October 2021 we know better. The question for the survival of democracy is rather whether we can generate that love and trust outside direct face to face personal relationship. Or are all the institutions in which we have lost trust - the church, reportedly, least of all - fated to be exploitatively, kleptocratically amoral till they bring the whole house of cards down?

A Missing Narrative

The other omission by Global Trends, again, that nowhere exists, takes us back to historical determinations:

"The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States." US Constitution, Article II Section 1. 

I mustn't waste time being flippant about this, so I'll say straight away that I thought this a Founding Fathers masterstroke. Tom Paine, we noted earlier, thought that the US Senate was a deception to block the straightforward expression of the people's will by the US House of Representatives. In Australia, we can see exactly that happening through abuse of the Constitution's intended role for the Senate. The US presidency was a potential solution to that problem. The US Constitution does have checks and balances as they are called in the lawmaking power of the Congress. Their use to block executive actions by the president looks to me like more constitutional abuse, though I leave that to constitutional experts. Though experts, I should add, are another resource on which the President can freely draw for the presidential cabinet. What the constitution does not say is that is that the president is responsible in everything they do and say to the mass media. That appears to me a mass media invention, that democratic convention as it has become that the media's job is to hold the president accountable to the people. The media interprets this commonly to mean that if the media disagree with what the President thinks or says the President is wrong, and that the President can do nothing without explaining why to the media. This looks like more abuse of power. There is probably an implied CODE view here that for all the potential complexity of the massive nation states, their rule is a simpler matter of direct relationship between the people and their elected representatives, with little room for other agencies to interpose themselves into this relationship. Finally, Trump appears to have been substantially influenced by Article II Section 1. He evidently thought his election as President made him the executive power in governing the US.

This is the narrative where the people rule by electorally mandated policy, the narrative that conforms to the Global Trends observation that 

"In the most basic sense, democracy means 'rule by the people'". (p 5) 

As usual, I can't blame Global Trends for using the phrase "rule by the people" with the usual implication of "whatever that means", at the start of its section "Varying Definitions of Democracy". There is no point in Global Trends not going along with the joke when the rest of the democratic world is. And, as noted, to say the narrative nowhere exists has to be qualified by saying, first, that it exists as basic - to repeat Global Trends' word - democratic theory, and that Trump gave us a crude but incomplete version of it in practice. We know it was incomplete, at a few points, the congressional obstruction of the Southern Border Wall being a sufficient example for now. And I have conceded that Trump's modest action on lobbying under Drain The Swamp would possibly have taken on a much more serious form in Trump's second term, when he was no longer a prisoner of the system which costs a billion dollars to run for President. Nevertheless, Promises Made Promises Kept is the basis of that narrative, the obstruction by Congress of the Border Wall the apparent clear constitutional abuse of obstruction of directly popularly  mandated policy. Not, again, that most people take much notice of that. And we know they can't afford to because if Promises Made Promises Kept developed to Voter Policy Mandate, and the division of the people by Party was replaced by growing bipartisanship, the people would unite, community between them would be gradually restored, their leadershipping division by "race", ie colour, ideology, party, gender, sexual preference, etc would be progressively extinguished, civic equality would bring greater material equality, and the whole elite oligarchy would be brought down like the house of cards it is in favour of Fraternal, loving trust between people and the morality which is democratic religion. Jeepers. If the people ruled, reason could make a comeback over emotion.

The other part of this narrative, perhaps less powerful, but requiring more attention because it is less obvious, is the individual mandate of the elected leader to rule by virtue of their election. This has little recognition in the public democratic discourse, nor in the parliamentary and congressional debate, insofar as the latter debate can legally circumvent it. Though neither as we have seen does explicitly mandated policy. But as for the public political discourse, whether policy is explicitly mandated or not, that doesn't stop every miniPOTUS attacking the policy as if election counted for nothing, music to the media's ears, which has to orchestrate this to retain its power, and to the ruling elites, gleeful that the people throw their vote in the bin, divided and ruled. That respect of electoral mandate, policy specific or individually general, would be a discipline of democratic morality, an example of the people unitedly and fraternally maintaining actual  democratic process against the impulse to seek power for their party and other causes at any cost, ultimately, the cost of their freedom. We know the mentality that seeks power by acting against other citizens and specifically their elective decision is fascist in spirit. It won't sustain freedom. 

Predictably, this respect for the elected leader is a two-way process, too complex for us to fully traverse  here, except in the general terms that it rests on trust of the leader by the people which the leader must generate. Trump, who acquired the love of nominally half of America, did this in two or three ways we can glance at. He gave the people a say on an extensive specific policy program. The good faith of Promises Made Promises Kept is undeniable. He spoke to the people directly to bypass the media he denounced as fake from bias, and which proved to be so, as his supporters could see. And he had a speech idiom which though not formally  accurate in the traditional presidential sense had the unusual quality of sincerely - impulsively - expressing what he believed at the time. Trump may have been the egotist, or the real estate dealer, who thought it was OK to talk up himself and his decisions to the point of exaggeration. But his supporters, including me, understood the idiom, and above all preferred the sincerity to the crafted polispeak whose overriding ulterior motive is to avoid criticism to secure votes. Trump produced outspoken Derangement Syndrome in many of the intelligentsia who considered themselves too wise to worry about a popular election. But not all the intelligentsia. 

Mandated policy is a fair gesture of good faith. President Biden suffers by comparison for having run on no specific promises, the idea that he was going to do something on global warming confused by the Democrat left's Green New Deal being the only clear articulation of policy, no more being known about what Biden would do than that it wasn't the Green New Deal. Biden ran on saying as little as possible while Obama beat the "race" drum for him. Trump's having run on specific promises in 2016 moreover sets a trap for all future presidential candidates, though, again, there is virtually no awareness of this. To make no specific promises exposes any candidate who wins to the charge of deception of the people about what they would do. It is not a good addition to the concealment of Biden's inarticulateness, to use a charitable term. Biden can be taken as the winner of an election seriously compromised on several counts. To that extent he has an individual mandate. But to have concealed the extent to which he would open the Southern Border could equally be taken as a deception but for which he would not have won. Three trillion dollars worth of global warming expenditure tied to infrastructure expenditure might, if specified, have also been electorally fatal for Biden. Even on a policy about which he seemed sceptical of the mainstream, global warming, Trump could do the job of expressing policy in a way that let people know where they stood: "Plant a billion trees". A victory with no policy specification looks too much like politicians being able to do whatever they like, which too often looks like not much hard work at all. And it follows the model of doing things, and asking the people if they approve at the next election, when it's years too late. Then they can elect another party which will do what it likes whether the people like it or not. It looks like parliament, Congress, and their paymasters and co-elites ruling the people, not the reverse.   

The further subtleties of this individual leadership mandate we can only touch on in this launch. They go very much to Trump's dismissal of the role of the media, and then speculatively with grave concerns beyond that. Trump early in his term made complimentary remarks about Russia's President Putin. His meetings with Putin included comments of a positive nature. There appear to be serious questions about whose business this was, other than Trump's and the American people's. There is no doubt that these remarks should have been reported to the people by the media. The question is why the opinions of the media, the Congress, and various other parties about these remarks mattered. The people had elected Trump as their executive power. What were these other opiners doing? Trump's book, at least the one I've read, is called The Art Of The Deal. And that I have read it seems significant, my not even being American. Anyone can read it, and more important, everyone knew the deal was Trump's modus operandi. The question is whether the hostile opinions of the media, of the Democrats or some Republicans in Congress, or anyone else, about favourable comment on Putin  were necessary, or whether, as Trump once put it to one interviewer in another context, "It doesn't matter".  If your purpose is to make a deal with someone, you may well want to take a positive attitude to them, express that publicly as proof that you are at least prepared to give that leader public credit. If you also have negative views of that leader, you may well conclude that when you are trying to make a deal with them isn't the time to express negative views. And if the media, or the Democrats and others in Congress, are of the view that positive views of Putin are a betrayal of America to the totalitarianism of Putin, who cares? They are not the executive power. Once again, we are back to CODE's earliest concern about the media, that it uses a monopoly of information to leverage its own opinions. Though nobody elected any of it. Nobody elected Congress as the executive power. 

The media attacking the President all over America raises the usual concerns that it is generic in the media to want to attack the elected. The media needs criticism to make its stories dramatic and sensational, and a power conferred by election on political figures makes media criticism irrelevant and has the usual other effects, reducing media power over how things are run, rejecting the media's ideology, limiting the career progress of journalists, and so on. But there seem to be wider implications of this. The media may have an interest in the American people remaining hostile to Russia and everything about Russia as a source of continuing stories of drama and conflict. This may not be a question only of the media seizing on comments in one situation to construct the news of the day. The media may have an interest in opposing any deals with Russia. It may not want any easing of tension between democracy and totalitarianism. The media interest also goes beyond this to a common interest with the other ruling elites. All heads of government know that their position is strengthened by the people's apprehension of threat from an enemy. The danger and the evil of Russia is a mechanism for America's ruling elite and the leaderships of democracies everywhere to retain the loyalty of their people, perhaps all the more necessary in that the elites also have to keep their peoples internally divided within the respective nations. National governments can be seen in the world context as no different from the internal leadershippers, those who love separate interests among the people so as to create more sectional leadership opportunities, What if the kind of activity Trump was engaging in, given his rejection of sectarianism in favour of a single humanity, had the effect of developing a friendship between the American and Russian people over the heads of their governments? What if, to put it another way, the US government and other democratic governments were in this respect no different from Putin, Xi and Kim Jong Un, and the actual people's of the world were capable of a Fraternity the opposite of their division as enemies by their governments? Trump may well have attitudes not shared by other national leaders with whom he reportedly did not get on well. Other leaders may well have thought the American people had made an unpardonable error in electing Trump although he wasn't supposed to win. They may have shared the progressive view that he had to be got rid of by any available means, including election if all else failed. We'll come back to this speculation when we glance at the military. But the question of what these leaders are doing who lead instead of their people will still be central. All these leaders, between wondering - with mixed feelings -  why their people were rioting about this and that, must further wonder what in Heaven's name Jesus could have been thinking to say:

 "Whoever among you wants to be great must be your servant, and whoever would be first will be your slave." (Matt 20 26-27)      

photo by kate-moun

Can Parliamentary Democracy Survive?

Writing this stuff in circumstances where the existing system is considered to be minimally democratic requires serious clarification. The US presidency is described as a masterstroke here because its executive power under the Constitution has the potential to avoid deadlocks between the US House of Representatives and Senate obstructing direct rule. That this doesn't always work is left to judgement here between legitimate checks and balances and partisan constitutional abuse. But either way, it seems that despite the executive power of the president, the US system is still "parliamentary", for better or worse. The support here of the executive power of the presidency is strengthened by seeing it as guided by electorally mandated policy, like Promises Made Promises Kept. Others may see that as a weakness. Still others may see the separate presidency itself as a weakness, not a masterstroke, arguing that rather than a separate presidential power, government were better left, as in the UK and Australia, to the majority in the parliament or Congress. It's reasonable to argue that the separate presidential power just compounds the risk of gridlock.

 I think despite these complications we can proceed with this subject, inclusively of America because Congress will exhibit many of the features of any parliamentary system.  The other reason for proceeding is that this is necessarily a global question more than an internally American one. CODE's perspective is internal to the US and Australia, and only fleetingly to other nations, and internal considerations in the US must have relevance here, as the Congressional briefing paper makes clear. Equally, a global decline in democracy goes very much to the question of whether parliamentary democracy is a viable system in the long run. Democracies have parliaments, and though some dictatorships do too,  they can be largely ignored, and aren't democratic. 

Insofar as this quick launching glance at parliaments goes, consideration of Congress is apart from the peculiar US complication of the Presidency. Though there is a possibility here that requires serious noting: Did the creation of the Presidency by the Founding Fathers signify their lack of faith in parliaments, as the sole democratic ruling power? That's a job for me, or someone, of reading the American State Papers. But  as to Congress as a case of parliament, we've noted earlier J S. Mill's acknowledgement that a benign dictator has been widely considered the best form of government, but for the problem that power corrupts. How many people would argue that having 450-odd members of Congress who are representatives of the people has solved the problem of corruption? With everything depending on majority vote, and the high cost of election limiting the Congress to two parties, how many members of Congress have to be corrupted for corrupt elements to substantially control government? Trying to corrupt a benign dictator can be very - fatally - risky. We can see intimations of this. Trump, no longer President, was apparently not a dictator, though millions of Americans apparently believe he was. But Trump had this idea that he was the executive power, and, perhaps dictatorially, concluded from this that nobody else was. Some of the first political attacks on Trump were for numerous sackings of officials. I don't suggest most of them were formally corrupt, but I do think they had an idea that they had influence with Trump as if they shared the executive power. Danger. Does multiplying the number of leaders by 450 just increase the system's vulnerability to corruption? NSW has just lost probably its most beloved ever Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, at least to the corruption of another former parliamentarian. 

Is it fair to take the example of Congress as I write, 4 October 2021? Democrat senators Manchin and Sinema are blocking President Biden's $3.5 trillion dollar Bill that apparently ties global warming and infrastructure together. CNN is complaining that the two senators are a couple of percent of the country holding it all to ransom, without mentioning the other fifty senators, the Republicans, voting with Manchin and Sinema. Laughable on the face of it. But CNN has at least this much of a point. The people elected a Democrat President, possible deceptions and irregularities aside, in Biden, and a Democrat House majority. And they elected Manchin and Sinema as Democrats. So what are the dominant democratic principles? Representatives' independence, or the people's mandate for Democrat rule? Tweeters are saying Manchin has been bought by the coal industry to block the global warming measures, but they always say that. And Manchin and Sinema may not need to be bribed. They are national figures here, as they wouldn't be if they just sat in their seats and voted on party lines. If all they achieve is the separation of infrastructure from climate, the tying of the two together evidently a presidential trick to make the combined Bill harder to block, Manchin and Sinema may come out of it miles ahead politically. Conviction, independence. And, unfortunately in a way, Manchin and Sinema have a point. Sinema has been on Twitter objecting to one Bill being held hostage to another, and the validity of that is undeniable. Why put people in the position where if they support one Bill they have to vote for another one whether they support it or not? Every senator is trashed by that, Democrats especially, in that it is assumed they will swallow any resentment at such treatment from party loyalty. Manchin and Sinema  are saying that the US can't afford $3.5 trillion, and for perfectly valid fiscal reasons they may be right. This is always a gamble - will the economy pick up? They can argue that Biden never said anything about spending $3.5 trillion, whether the US and the world were still battling COVID and its economic uncertainties  or not. And more particularly, they can argue that Biden never made any specific promises about what he would do, like "Build the Wall", "Ditch the TPP" and Trump's other promises. And people, including Manchin and Sinema, could ague that that was because Biden had no specific idea of what he would do, even on Pennsylvania coal and oil, and fracking, so that when people voted for him, they were mandating nothing specific. If he'd run on a promise like Trump's, like "I'll electrify all America's cars", expenditure limits wouldn't matter. $1 trillion wouldn't come into it. But Biden can be charged by Manchin, Sinema and the Republicans with rather concealing how much he intended to spend from the people, and trying to construct a situation where he can govern however he liked. Which of course can include, "Not well". The candidate who can't tell the people enough so that they know what they are voting for doesn't inspire confidence in their ability to do anything. This looks like part of the real reason Trump inspired Trump Derangement Syndrome. Trump set this precedent for a two-way responsibility between the President and the people, so the media, and much of Congress, and the other elites were hysterical, and had to make their muppets hysterical too. Trump, consciously or instinctively, posed a threat of embryonic genuine democracy between the elected and the people which could have run a truck over all the unelected elites, and changed the situation of the elected ones radically.  

Democracy enthusiasts may be able to find advantages for democracy in the processes I have described above. I have tried to, and there may be some beyond the absence of absolute dictatorship corrupted absolutely, but I have had trouble thinking of them.  My first thought in this regard, that at least this process of debate about the combined Bill should improve its quality, has as far as I can see no basis. Expertise is as we have noted freely available to the President in the selection of a cabinet from within or outside Congress. Members of Congress are not elected on the basis of any particular expertise. There are  further problem with improvement of the Bill. They arise from its purposes. The first problem with that is that they may still be unspecified, something I can only judge from the lack of their specification on Twitter or in the Australian media I look at. With no detailing of the $3.5 trillion expenditure, assessing its economic merit seems impossible. Compared to the benign dictator, the US President is in an invidious position. The dictator has no need to secure the $3.5 trillion in advance. The dictator can simply spend $1 trillion without necessity to raise the budgetary spending limit - one of the sticking points about Biden's Bill - and look at its fiscal and economic effects in a year's time. There's no gamble, no need to put people in the position of having to commit to expenditure years ahead. In the context of US democracy, what is happening raise concerns no dictator prompts. As I write, October 4 2021, President Biden is a month short in effect of completing his first year, in that the mid-term congressional elections will be in early November 2022. It looks quite likely the Democrats will lose their majority in Congress, as would normally happen, meaning that Biden's funding would be cut off, as Trump's was. It is not at all unrealistic therefor to apprehend that Biden is now attempting to secure a piggy bank three years ahead of time to buy his and the Democrats' re-election in 2024. From a budgetary point of view, this would to many rank with the clumsiness of the Afghanistan withdrawal.                                                   photo by parker-johnson

Furthermore, as to the congressional process around the $3.5 trillion Bill, many of the participants are lying. They are lying in what we must unfortunately say is a democratic sense. There are easy tests of this. Every Senator claims to be voting on their independent evaluation of the Bill's merit. All 50-odd Republican Senators oppose the Bill. All Democrats but two, the minimum number required to block it, support the Bill. If the parties' positions were reversed, and a Republican president, say Trump, were seeking $3.5 trillion, would all the Republican Senators have their present reservations about exceeding or raising the debt ceiling? Would all the Democrats but two be supporting the Republican President's Bill as fine in respect to the debt ceiling? We know this is utter nonsense. Democrats would oppose the Republicans on party lines as the Republicans now oppose the Democrats. How many people believe that all the Democrats but two, the minimum number to block it, support the Bill, genuinely dismissing Sinema's and Manchin's concerns rather than voting on party lines? Indeed, what are the chances that not a single Republican Senator, 0 out of 50, believes global warming action sufficiently urgent that they would let the Biden Bill pass, but for party loyalty? These are all lies, and however many senators you think are involved, they are enough to have the balance of power in government.  Democratic government. There'll be plenty of people who'll say there's no way any Republican would vote up global warming action, just as there'll be many who'll say no Democrat would be concerned about a Presidential attempt to circumvent the checks and balances of the mid-term Congressional elections (which under some circumstances mightn't be a bad idea). I have doubts on both counts. 

Trump's role in this is not limited to Republican President with policy mandate. His policy of Drain The Swamp seems to me to be a precedent  potentially embarrassing to all future presidents. I have made some excuses for Trump's limited action on this promise, that it would be a second term project when, no longer able to be re-elected, Trump could at least have scaled down the cost of candidature or in other ways reduced favours in return for contributions. He didn't run on this or any new promises, wrongly convinced, I thought, that he could win by out-campaigning and out-debating Biden.  But in a second term he would have been caught by is own promise like any other president. I find it difficult to know what to make of Biden's failure to promise to drain the swamp,. other than that he accepts political corruption in the system. The other alternative, that he believes there is no swamp, seems to defy the view of the half of America who elected Trump in 2016 on that promise, as far as that indication goes. For it to be allowed to fade from the political landscape of the US, for all that the elites will be desperate for it to do so, is hard for me to distinguish from a capitulation to corruption. Democrat or Republican voters who don't think that policy desirable because they don't want to upset a system under which they are doing well seem similarly to capitulate. If not a nail in the coffin, this seems to count for quite a few of the thousand cuts by which US democracy dies. 

The other odd reflection on politics in the US is its ranking as a flawed democracy. I have dealt with Freedom House's suggestion that the US' ranking decline accelerated under Trump. The decline on the Economic Intelligence Unit's index, where 8.0 is the Flawed cut-off, was as follows:  2006 8.22; 2008 8.22; 2010 8.18; 2011 8.11; 2012 8.11; 2013 8.11; 2014 8.11; 2015 8.05; 2016 7.98; 2017 7.98; 2018 7.96; 2019 7.96; 2020 7.92. I haven't looked at Freedom House's numbers on the acceleration of the decline under Trump, but I think it might be a postmodernist, serious or even critical thinking acceleration. I would have thought this had to be related to Drain The Swamp, as well as other factors. I've speculated earlier about ways Trump may well have caused other people to attack democratic norms, and there is no space to examine the democratic criteria of the EIU here. But what is going on when the leader of the free world sinks to the 25th place on democracy rankings, in a  pretty steady15 year decline, and nobody take action to restore Full Democracy, beats me. Either the indexes are useless, or the dominant influences in the US are antidemocratic. It looks like another round to Plato.  

My interest in the US from CODE's perspective notwithstanding, the real point of the indices is the world. Its democratic decline pretty much parallels America's, as all the indices considered tell us. Analysis like that I have just done of the United States has only indirect relevance to the international decline. Situations like that of the US Senate at 4 October 2021 are only illustrative of the workings of parliaments suggesting why democracy might fail, and dictatorship prevail. How far that US experience is applicable to other countries would vary widely. It is relevant to the second question we'll glance at about the world situation, whether established democracies can regress to authoritarianism. 

The first question  is that of the resilience of new democracies, their capability of developing from their establishment in place of more authoritarian regimes into durable full democracies impervious to authoritarian resurgence or subversion. I take this question from the many posed by Global Trends because it is clearly central to the spread of democracy in the world, and it is something about which I - and anyone - has some definite knowledge. That is to say, the many other issues raised in the congressional briefing paper are all so contested that it seems little definite is known about international relations. To say there is no science of international relations is not to decry the university courses of that name for trying to establish one, but it is to say that anyone who thought such a science exists needs to look at Global Trends, Afghanistan, and perhaps even what follows here shortly. Global Trends leaves little doubt about new democracies:

"... baseline levels of support for democracy differed between established democracies, new democracies, and nondemocracies (with levels of support generally highest within established democracies), but ... recent trend-lines across each type varied across countries and regions." (p 17)  

A fuller picture encompasses newer democracies:

"If traditionally high levels of support for democracy around the world have related at least in part to its instrumental appeal, then challenges within democracies in recent years (including within the United States) may be eroding support for democracy as a political system. According to the U.S. intelligence community, some of these challenges include poor governance, economic inequality, and 'weak national political institutions'. Many challenges facing newer democracies in particular may relate to difficulties in establishing modern states capable of of providing services in line with the demands of their citizens. The connection between democracy and attainment and attainment of the economic and security rewards of certain international institutions may also be loosening. Apparent democratic backsliding among some member states in the EU (such as Hungary and  Poland) and NATO (such as Turkey) have called into question the ability and inclination of these institutions to enforce democratic standards for countries that have already acceded to membership. 

Relatedly, a class of economically successful authoritarian capitalist states has emerged. To the extent that these countries, China foremost among them, are able to continue to grow at high rates while forestalling political liberalisation ..." (p 16)

Again, these authoritarian states are new, I, at 75 years, being older than the People's Republic of China, and much older than post-Soviet Russia. I think they may be just learning, while modern democracy, which we can date from 1789, presents us with the picture of contemporary democratic America. While democratic regression is anything but uniform, the nations already listed for that are of course a worry. Hungary, from my skim of its history, with problems of World War II and the USSR, looks like a sad mess. Its succession of "leaders" in the 20th century, ("leaders" being to CODE executive heads where the people didn't rule, so including every US president and every other democratic leader, that being qualified by respect for mandate like Trump's) showed little sign to me of taking Hungary anywhere, so the rise of the illiberal Orban is hardly a surprise in this context. Poland, after the years of Soviet dominance and the liberation through Lech Walesa, is surely a disappointment. An ally of England, England's declaration of war in 1939 because of Hitler's invasion of Poland, one might have thought years of the communist yoke would see it embrace democracy. More detailed study needed there. But Turkey must in one way be even more disappointing. The democratising work of Ataturk is one of the legends of modern democracy, as I took it more democratically advanced than Mrs Suu Kyi's achievement in Burma, now undone by another military junta with Suu Kyi a prisoner. In Turkey, while the spirit of Ataturk is still as I understand strong, Erdogan has applied the usual method of engineering an election on the extension of his powers, like Putin, till 2036, like Xi for life. 

 I'm going to anticipate our next consideration, the vulnerability to decline of  established democracies, because the immediate point that needs to be made about the new democracies backsliding applies to the established democracies as well. The point is that none of these democracies were democracies, not as CODE would view them, in that none of them were based on the people's rule as envisaged by CODE. Whatever democracy was offered to these peoples was  a variant of the currently operating democracy. This is not to criticise the democratic leaders of these new democracies, especially Mrs Suu Kyi, with whom, like all sensible men at least devoted to democracy, I am of course secretly in love. I just mean, first, that they offered democracy as they saw and understood it in practice, the most realistic thing to do. They may for all I know have had ideas for future popular rule similar to CODE's. Second, with new democracies, there are practical reasons for not progressing straight to popular rule as per CODE. The initial steps to that, like Voter Policy Mandate, pretty much require people to be able to read. Voter Policy Mandate requires the infrastructure of effective communication with the people, an established Electoral Commission transmit parties' policy statements to the people, an established democratic party structure to which the task of developing policy and writing policy statements for electoral mandating can be realistically assigned. It is common sense to say that these things would have to be posited as the future goals of developing democracy. It is common nonsense to suggest that their immediate positing as future goals presents a problem. In the practical real world, sense deals with these things. Schooling, and reading, expands. A cautious administration may take a strict approach to the problem, a reading test: if you can read, you can register for VPM. Everyone gets a vote. A repressive approach? No, its logic is clear, and ruling people have other things to think about, like learning to read, and repression whose logic is anything but clear. 

This failure to offer the peoples of the new democracies ruling power, prospectively as I have suggested, looks to me to be crucial. This is not to say that any regime is proof against military takeover, though the task of getting armies and police to oppress their own people has serious difficulties. Nor is it to deny that the democracy that was newly offered to these peoples was a substantial improvement on what they had before. But the simple logic of this as considered here seems to be that if people everywhere support democracy in theory, but are cynical about its practice, why not offer them a democracy which conforms to theory - the people rule? Or, to put it simply another way, one would think that the more power the people were offered in the prospective democracy, the more vigorously they would defend it. That power is their freedom; you are only free if you rule. The counter argument will be advanced that, no, the people would rather watch television and variously amuse themselves and their democracy to death - as they might see it, leave government to their leaders. Apparently not. That is the state of affairs at present in which democracy is in global decline. Nor should the future perspective on this be neglected. Nobody knows what a democratic society is like. We do know that it conforms in principle to an Enlightenment vision of an ideal and universal humane society. We can see both ways and reasons for that vision to have been hijacked. We can't see it in any way substantially expressed in concrete form, except perhaps in the CODE novels, and specifically Brave World Old and New 2 when I get around to writing it, though the institutional structures are described in Towards Democracy. But the alternative to the Enlightenment vision takes us back to the view that divine monarchy is the only realistic order and Le Maistre, 1797, though of course it continues through the political and spiritual heirs of Le Maistre up to Nietzsche with his ruling Supermen and Nietzsche's own fascist heirs like Hitler and tyrants generally. We don't know what an Enlightenment democracy would be like, because it is in the future. But given that it is the hope on which modern democracy has been founded, since 1789 as we've loosely dated it, the whole idea of for some reason not pressing on to realise its promise, and find out what it's like, in favour of any of the available alternatives which we see as we look around the world at societies, democracies and others, appears fantastic. Like, no, no, let's not do democracy.  

This brings us to the final question about the backsliding of democracies, that in relation to established democracies. Global Trends sounds what is for it the clear alarm:

"Political scientists have traditionally viewed countries that have reached a certain level of wealth and have experienced peaceful democratic transitions as being stable, 'consolidated' democracies largely impervious to backsliding  into nondemocratic forms of government. Arguably weakening support for democracy within some long-established democracies, however, has spurred an emerging and highly contested debate over whether democratic 'deconsolidation' is more possible than previously believed." (p 16) 

I have pre-empted the answer to this in considering the previous point. We can see in the Global Trends comment the ambiguity between support for democracy in theory and practice, the strong preference for it as a system, against the dismay at the form it is actually taking. Global Trends can't entirely avoid this, and anyway we can be pretty sure the two things must be related, despite the commonly wide difference between them: disappointment at how democratic government is actually working must lower support for democracy as a system to some extent, at least at some points on the support scale. The answer we have already considered to this is that of course support for democracy will weaken if it is not actual democracy, not actually a system of popular rule in which the people are therefore free. 


Moral Diplomacy 

We must move somewhat beyond Global Trends in bringing this quick launch treatment of democracy in the world to a close. Although it is no fault of Global Trends, it is necessary to recognise that it is in the nature of such a document to be only partly in touch with reality, certainly from CODE's point of view, and it would seem from the viewpoint of the billion or so people cynical about democracy in practice. Global Trends is within its brief to talk of a hotly contested debate about deconsolidation of established democracy. But there must also be a realistic perspective that to be reporting doubts about the durability and support of a lie as novel and contested surely only addresses only half the issue at best. The Enlightenment foundations of modern democracy in a popular rule of Liberty Equality and Fraternity have been overridden by power-seeking elites organised in media, parliament, bureaucracy, universities, the apparatus of wealth, and so on, in the absence of the organisation of popular rule, to rule over the people. It seems obvious to view, seems the reason people have dissatisfaction with democracy unrestrained by their individual and collective responsibility for it as rulers, seems historically evident in warnings like Burke's and Wilde's about the press, seems clearly articulated in the reservations of the US Founding Fathers about popular rule, seems the reasons for the people's loss of  faith in the institutions of democracy, seems like confirmation of the predictions since Plato and echoed by Tocqueville's concerns that democracies would tear themselves apart, as they seem to be doing without the unifying effect of rule by the people on which, as Global Trends confirms, they are theoretically founded, and so on. This isn't to say that people can't have a view that "Oh no, democracy will bounce back again". It's just to say that there is a position in the highly contested matter of democratic deconsolidation of "Er, well, yes", or "Exactly". 

                                                                                                                                                       photo by jason-leung

In  trying to keep this thumbnail sketch of the world within the brief bounds of a launch, I have to acknowledge that what I've just said is already moving further from Global Trends and into the theoretical domain of CODE. I think it's worth pointing out, even if only to be fair to Global Trends, that such documents and the indices they consider don't try to fully compass reality. They present pictures of things, but not their causes, their dynamic mechanisms. "Pictures' is my word here, but for the sake of CODE we can't overlook the limitations of "pictures", in the TV and newspaper democracies, even when, as with the indices, we know that 's all we're looking at. Postman draws the distinction between pictures and language by quoting others:

"'Pictures', Gavriel Salomon has written, 'need to be recognised, words need to be understood'. By this he means that photographs present the world as object; language, the world as idea." (Amusing Ourselves to Death p 72)  

And Global Trends is both picture, indeed pictures of every hear from 2006, and language. Nor does Global Trends entirely avoid cause. 

"Challenges to and apparent dissatisfaction with government performance within democracies and the concomitant emergence of economically successful authoritarian capitalist states may be affecting in particular democracy's traditional instrumental appeal as the political system most capable of delivering economic growth and national prestige." (p 1)

So there's the picture of China, with the second highest number of billionaires in the world, about 630 from memory, about a hundred behind the US, and how it may be related to democracy's standing in the world. Though, on the other hand, ...Congress members, up to you to decide, not us. Global trends must report, for pictorial accuracy, numerous statements like 

"Xi stated that China's model of 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' could serve as a 'new choice' for countries hoping to speed up their development and preserve their independence . Xi later stated, however, that China will not 'export' its political model or ask that other countries copy China's methods." (p 16)

Not sure that the people of Tibet are convinced about that. O, actually, Hong Kong. Or, um, Taiwan. But Global Trends can't even indulge itself in that kind of cynicism. It will say elsewhere that some observers have detected in this kind of thing a motive of the authoritarians in deflecting criticism of their oppressive regimes - don't put your ideas on us by talking to our people about freedom, and we won't put our ideas on you. But again, they won't even take that cynical tone. Your call, Congress. 

                                                                                                                                                      photo by juan-mayobre

This apology to Global Trends anticipates the further swing into CODE to the effect that the world Global Trends portrays  is ridiculous in the CODE optic, and thus  incomprehensible by any other means than the sort of theorising that underpins CODE. Perhaps the best place to start this argument is with the proportion of the world's nations classified by the EIU as Full Democracies standing at 11 percent in 2017. With Freedom House saying the democratic decline accelerated in 2017, and despite our doubts in some respects about Freedom House, in 2021 the Full Democracies figure can only be the same or worse. 232 years after the beginnings of modern democracy, the proportion of Full Democracies is 11%. The United States, the 1789 home of modern democracy with revolutionary France and the democratic forebear of both, England, has been on a slide of several years down the Flawed Democracy scale, of which however it is still among the most democratic, just below "Full". That is the United States where the top 1 percent of wealth holders have 32% and the poorer 50% of the people have 2% of the national wealth. This launch isn't the place  to analyse how far what is happening in the US can be seen as democratic decline; it's covered in Towards Democracy. Views on this will differ, and it suffices to say that is because the narratives on it have diverged; substantial parts of the US can't talk meaningfully to substantial other parts. That says enough about both US democracy and why there's no point analysing it here. 

As to numbers, Global Trends contains at least one statement so alarming that I have to suggest it is a misinterpretation of its own data from the EIU - unintentional misinterpretation. The document says:

"Approximately 23% of respondents expressed support for representative democracy and rejected all three nondemocratic alternatives posed.) (p 17) 

It's not as bad as 23% looks. The data is in a table in which the support for representative democracy is  at 78%, and the support for another democratic alternative, Direct Democracy, at 68 percent. The three nondemocratic options are Rule By Experts, with a narrow majority at 49% support, (some "don't know"s) Rule by a strong leader, rejected by 73%, and Rule by the Military, rejected by 75%. First, the support for democracy would properly have to include also the number of respondents who supported direct democracy and rejected all the nondemocratic options. That could easily on the numbers have been another 20%.But the other problem is that nearly half the respondents are wiped out of supporting democracy by the inclusion of "Rule by experts" in nondemocratic alternatives. Rule by experts is not democracy, but it's not as undemocratic as Strong Leader or the Military. Everyone knows that elected representatives from the President down are reliant on expert advice. To put it another way, where who rules is unclear because the people don't, and you'll commonly hear "the media runs the country", "the military industrial complex", "wealthy elites and the swamp", "the bureaucracy", as well as the elected representatives, "experts run the country' is probably the least nondemocratic option. I know I'm arguing here that democracy looks sick, but it's not yet as bad as 23%, I don't think. Sheesh. 

The divergent narratives, however, are useful pointers in a way, and here we can come back to Slipowitz' and Repucci's idea that democracy is fine if we just sold it better, with a degree of sympathy. They can only mean, fine as its practised. But whether they or  other people make that distinction or not  that general idea, that if you're for democracy you can't go wrong, isn't any way limited to our "woke gals" - er, persons. It's frequent in Global Trends, with, of course, the generic qualifications that it's contested:

" ... those democracy promotion efforts, in the words of one analyst, have arguably been motivated by 'a clear normative commitment to democracy as a universal value,'" (p 15). 

Unfortunately as it appears for this view, the fully democratic nations in the world stand at 11%, unless they've dropped lower. 232 years after the French Revolution and US Constitution. Global Trends also tells us 

"EIU's figures .. indicate that the percentage of the world's population living in either a 'full' or a 'flawed' democracy was below 50% in 2017, with 4.5% living in the former." (p 12)

4.5% in full democracies - countries with big populations are backsliding more. ".. democracy as a universal value."  Yet it seems more of this universal value isn't better. More would mean the people ruling and free.

The more optimistic views of the condition and future of democracy is quite properly articulated repeatedly in Global Trends:

" ... from a longer term historical perspective, analysts have noted that significant 'reverse waves' against democratic expansion have been observed in prior periods before giving way once more to continued democratisation. Samuel P Huntington famously observed two such 'reverse waves',' the first lasting from 1922 to 1945, and the second from 1960 to 1975, during which the number of democracies in the world regressed significantly before giving way to renewed democratic expansion and eventual new highs in global levels of democracy around the world....

Those who have cautioned against excessive pessimism about the present state of democracy argue that the number of democracies in the world remains near its all time peak .." (p 13)

Again, this yo-yo view of democracy has no narrative of democracy's developmental dynamic in the world. Huntington may be deservedly famous; I don't know what he actually said. And the point should be made that these indices and their survey basis have their own unique value. They are factual; public opinion, other measures whose construction we must assume was sound, said such and such. Theory is interpretative, and thus speculative. If only theory enables us to understand what's actually happening, there being "nothing as practical as good theory", we need fact as well. But the photographic nature of these past "waves" still has that static character, that it's as if there's no distinction between the democratic decline from the 1920s, with the Bolsheviks consolidating in Russia, Mussolini bringing fascism to Italy, Hitler gaining traction in Germany, etc, and the decline of the 20 teens. 

So these snapshot views of world democracy ignore developmental dynamics which some people take quite seriously. Some folk think, indeed, it seems generally accepted, that we won World War II, and democracy defeated fascism. We also won the Cold War, "we" meaning mainly the US, 1947 - 1991, against Soviet Communism. The Soviet Union fell apart in the 1980s, the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989. 

So, for about 20 years at the most, from about 1985 to 2005, we thought the question about the superiority of democracy had been decisively answered. We'd won.

"The United States was left as the world's only superpower." (Wikipedia "Cold War")

That developmental dynamic of democracy seems to me to need to be set against the reverse wave theory and the democracy indices it implicitly or explicitly reflects. There can be no doubt that the reverse wave theory suggests that the historical development theorists seeing democracy as finally universally supreme were delusional. With good reason. In 2021 we have China and to a lesser extent Russia challenging the democratic West as if the Soviets had never collapsed in 1991. But this brainteasing situation actually seems to be one in which both the reverse wave theorists and the historical development theorists extol the supreme virtues of democracy, yet it is not just the wavists who prove the developmentalists wrong, but each prove the other wrong. For the developmentalists can equally say to the wavists, "You're telling us democracy is fine, because when it goes down, it comes back up, but you're neither telling us why it goes down or comes up." There is no doubt that the developmentalists are justified in saying "Your account says we can learn nothing from history. We may have been wrong, but we tried to make sense of what was going on." There can be no doubt that in that sense reverse wave theory is mindless, a human submission to uncontrollable fate. And whether the developmentalists would make this point or not, the logical implication of reverse wave theory is quite clear: if, contrary to its assumption that democracy is fine because every time it goes down it comes back up, democracy is subject to these periodic global declines, that would suggest we need to take a critical look at democracy to find out why it repeatedly declines. What's fine, as a universal value, about something that keeps backsliding?

 I'll have to repeat a couple of points to round this off. First, the point at which the optimists of reverse wave theory assure us that democracy is healthily resilient is 4.5% of people living in full democracies, they being 11% of nations. And here, the developmental theorists, where my sympathy and CODE's clearly lies, come into their own. For even if their jubilation, and mine, about the Berlin Wall coming down was misplaced, they alone can at least say "Hey we were wrong". Reverse wave theory can't be wrong as a picture of the past. All it can do is wait another twenty years to say "Good, democracy bounced up again", or "Darn, democracy is in lasting decline", with the real question that is the elephant in the room for wavists, that of why the universal value has not maintained steady forward progress and spread throughout the world, still not even on the screen. The developmentalists can at least discover why they were wrong in 1989, recognise that as the old fascisms (communist or Nazi) were discredited, new forms have emerged within a human lifetime presenting far more sophisticated and powerful challenges to democracy. The authoritarians are learning. 


We therefore have the optimists about democracy in a kind of 4.5% fairyland, the wavists saying the developmentalists were hopelessly wrong, the developmentalists implying, at least, that the wavists are useless spectators of the past. So the thread of this is not lost, I'll say now that CODE's view of why neither group of democratic optimists are correct is that the democracy of which they speak is fake, not ruled by the people. If you want to know why democracy keeps going down before it bounces  back up, why the triumph of 1989 30 years later is like the rubble of the Berlin Wall, that's the answer. Democracy in its present form arguably holds its own in the world, or arguably doesn't, but rather piggybacks on a theory of democracy which is a long way from current practice. 

Launch brevity or not, there can be no shying away from theoretical speculations here, this material always likely to break formal bounds. But the democratic regressions of both reverse wave theory and developmentalism raise the question of political and social system decline, as in "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", which I must read. Like many new conceptions of society, Enlightenment and Revolutionary democracy was presented as the successor of all other systems which it would supersede and universally displace. Marxist-Leninist socialism was a more recent such proposal. Here we confront the question of what it was about democracy that promised to supersede all other systems, and the answer in a word seems to be "Equality". In CODE that is civic equality - equal political power. Material equality is seen as a denial of human difference. But though Freedom may be the goal of Equality, it is entailed by it. If we are civically equal, nobody has more power over us then we do over them. We are as free as you can be in society, living together, under the Social Contract of course. Equality of civic power means equal rule, by the people, their unity where divided rule will not work, and thus their Fraternity. 

photo by priscilla-du-preez

All of history has been characterised by "waves", the obvious ones being larger than the reverse waves of democracy. In the ancient world, global indices could have measured monarchical waves surging and regressing subject to republican waves, where at least some of the citizens elected representatives to exercise governing power. We know, with our view of the ancient world that centres on Europe and the Middle East including North Africa, that there could have been a democracy index with a minute registration of democracy in Greece. But if a true global index had been possible, the number of tribes governed by councils of men whose authority was based on its recognition by all the tribe, in other cases by councils that included women, might have produced surprising democratic scores. In the Western world, it looks like monarchy sustained from ancient times an upward surge excepting in England, until the American and French revolutions, which began the globalisation of modern democracy. This seems especially so given that republican emperors took on divinity which made them little different from divine monarchs. We can see "waves" in other societal movements, like colonialism, waves by nation as in Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, French. But a global colonialism index was bound to eventually show decline from inherent flaws in the movement. Wherever Indigenous populations already represented a fair share of the world's land, with rare exceptions like the Aztecs, their country would have to be returned to them. Whether Indigenous rule was restored, as in India, Africa, South-East Asia, even China, or not, as in Australia and North and South America, colonies were always going to demand independence from the mother country. Both capitalism and socialism have been "waves", socialism surging with the USSR and the People's Republic of China, declining with the dissolution of the USSR and one would think also with  China's capitalism growing to second on the world billionaires scale.  So capitalism, the economic rival of socialism as we thought, continues its global surge apparently not just as the economy of democracy, though it wasn't that under National Socialism either. 

We can see that in a monarchy, where only the royal family rules, often in an hereditary line for centuries, challenged only by other noble families, there cannot be equality. In a republic where only certain certain citizens get to vote - that's apart from the slaves who aren't citizens - and next thing you have a divine emperor, there is no equality. Colonialism in its periodic upsurges was always based on a rough equality of land share, mostly doomed to retreat before the high Indigenous population densities, doubly doomed my the demands of colonies for the equality of independence. We've dealt with socialism - a bogus material equality in that it denied human difference, and commonly fraught with the civic inequality of communist tyranny. The whole point and character of capitalism is material inequality; you compete to get ahead commercially. In a world of competing nations, capitalism's material competitiveness has economic and probably military value, though the latter is not so clear after the USSR's nuclear armament. It is futuristic to talk of a world without national rivalry, though there may, as we'll see, still be good reason to talk about it. But without national rivalry, a societally divisive inequality of capitalism has doubtful intrinsic value, apparently far more likely to do harm than good. The capitalist extremes of super wealth are, far from necessary to maintain material comfort for all, apparently an obstruction of it. The inherent benefits of capitalism as it now is thus seem ultimately for a very few folk. If capitalism is buying its way to democratic majorities by bribing half the American people to turn their backs on the poorer half, CODE suggests it is only a matter of time before the better off realise that the bribe is a bad bargain. Contemporary capitalism may well lead to hostility against  capitalists and their minions as it led to beheading monarchs and aristocrats, if a sense of difference between the regimes and of their different attitudes to inequality is lost. There appears for example to be a problem in the US of quality of life being compromised by inadequate health care, often fatally, capitalist societies and their exchange transactions being dominated by money rather than life quality factors. The system might work much better on the basis that Amazon's taxes this year will be building hospitals in Nevada and Ohio, rather than just be money, clarifying for people where they stand with capitalism in a democratically helpful way. Money's obscure, abstract. Though capitalism may now seem to be surging in the world rather than democracy, capitalism appears to be worthless without democracy, if equality continues to be the driving force of societal historical development. Past a certain point, nobody likes trickery, though CODE has faith that things can always be resolved with amicable reasonableness. 

One more point is needed to background this narrative, and provide further reflection on waves and indices as opposed to developmental analysis. The reference to a reverse wave from 1960 to 1975 may accurately reflect global survey for the indices. In the absence of any detail on it, there's no criticism of it here. The important point for democracy and specifically equality comes from historical development observation that this was the period of the social revolution in the West, when the democratic nations answered the question of equality. Discrimination became illegal. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in 1968. King's legacy was equality for blacks, the end of skin colour ("racial") discrimination. Discrimination against homosexuals and women became illegal, with the same follow-on for transsexuals, and other extensions to the disabled, the aged, and so on. In the period 1960 to 1975 three other things happened, apparently as part of the same cultural movement that ended discrimination. They were the American withdrawal from and loss of the Vietnam War, the hippy movement with its spiritualistic philosophies of peace and anti-materialism, and the birth of the world environmental movement with the publication of Silent Spring in 1962. This period was good for equality and thus for democracy, paving the way for a relatively smooth realisation of the law in practice, the normal backlash overridden by both law and overwhelming popular opinion. It was equally clearly bad for capitalism, and for the military, the growth of the peace movement being yet another development from this period. Bad for capitalism and the military points to the military industrial complex of which President General Eisenhower warned. It was a period when for the wealthy establishment in the US and other Western nations things seemed to have got out of hand. In our discussion here, it does raise questions of how the significance of this period is reflected in a reverse wave. That significance should, one would have thought, have been for a further 50 or 100 years' smooth progress to democracy. By 2021, as suggested in relation to Repucci and Slipowitz earlier, with the election of Biden, and the removal of the troublesome Trump with his popular policy mandating, hostility to the media, and threats against a swamp which included both parties, the woke feeling would presumably be that things are back under establishment control, including the idea that democracy is fine but for its marketing  around the world. As we'll see, the point about marketing may even have validity in a different perspective. 

Democracy: No no no no noooo!

It turned out, though I didn't anticipate it, that nobody with any power liked the idea of a steady, quiet progression to a democracy in which equality developing to universality meant differences could be resolved by calm reasoned discussion. Now, in 2021, we can see why this movement had to be turned around. The mass media didn't like calm reason because it is the emotion of dramatic sensation that holds television viewers and ratings, with the journalistic careers, the ideological divisions, and the proprietor's power that goes with large media audiences and sales. A relatively conflict-free society, we now understand, is a mass media nightmare. And now we can start to see how broad this threat was. To continue a movement in which the society had come together on antidiscrimination and equality was to endorse the people running things, popular government in a sense. The media did not want the people running things. The media wanted the media running things. The threatening harmonised people had to be broken up, by insisting that no, it was discriminatory, and using the extremist backlash against the new tolerance to represent the people overall, or simply confecting extremist backlash where it didn't exist, to restore conflict. The people have to be bad to prove they can't rule. That Trump, of course, loved them. Every would-be leader who wanted to jump up above the people at the head of their own  sectional following, the Black Lives Matter leaders of blacks, the woke third generation feminists, enemies of the toxic male and rape culture, the white supremacists, probably taking the liberally cast bait of white privilege, all part of the desperation to generate the hostile reactions which abuse of the mainstream were certain to produce in some folks, all these leadershippers would have been appalled at the idea of an equal society, where everyone was a leader equally. The universities, keen to attract paying students, who had no interest in graduating to be ordinary citizens like other people, offered radical leadership of the various causes, young people finding radicalism always attractive. Hanging on to the postmodernism which its French homeland had discarded decades ago, the universities exploited its divisive identity politics towards exactly the counter-Enlightenment, anti-democratic ends that the poststructuralists intended. Universal humanity had to be divided. And the media loved them for it, not least because the media had done their degrees at those universities. That was how to get jobs in the media. And the political parties were aghast at this, because here in an equal people was the potential for the people to rule the nation rather than the political parties and their swamp as Trump called them, the Democrats most aghast because, having no policy coherence as the second party of capitalism when the Republicans were clearly the first, their alliance with the media and the universities from which the Democrats also drew their candidates and ideas was thus their only way to power without purpose. Popular power meant they might have to work for the people on policy instead of the fundraising that dominated their political careers over and under the table. And what would the parties do if ideological division collapsed? Where would their programmed voter bases be? The military-industrial complex didn't like the people stopping a war, especially with the multiple indications that this could be associated with the people ruling the nation, and doing so according to a philosophy of peace. We'll return tot this. Capitalism didn't like the social revolution because equality with the people ruling threatened an end to the fundamental dynamic of US politics that money could buy political power as well as material privilege, with the anti-materialist philosophy spelled out by these hippies in support of spirituality. Hardly less alarming for capitalism than a civic equality that overrode wealth and a spiritualist disdain of money was the new environmentalism, yet another potential popular unifying factor threatening profit. Fortunately its media would turn that debate into an emotional mad dog's breakfast, and the Republicans could be counted on to hand the Democrats their sole source of policy credibility, even above Trump despite his "plant a billion trees" and "I've got nothing against electric cars". No matter what your genius for doing deals it won't work with the biosphere - or maybe only in your second and final presidential term when you no longer have to play politics and fundraising. That little threat from the Founding Fathers had to be stopped too. Democracy isn't just the worst possible system apart from all the others; it's the system nobody likes except practically everyone. 

 


This brings us at last to the heading on this section, "Moral Diplomacy", and the associated claim that the state of the world is ridiculous. The proposition is that the obvious instrument for the democracies to use in the contest with authoritarian states is not used, not available to be used, because elite elements in the democratic states do not want it to be available, as it would mean the democratic states becoming real democracies. In this way the democratic elites deny the democracies their most effective means of dealing with the totalitarians, and thus prop them up, maintaining the danger to the democracies and their peoples of totalitarian victory over them. The instrument of effectively dealing with the authoritarian states to which I refer is moral diplomacy, whereby the people of the tyrannies are given to understand that under democracy they would rule their nation and be free, and the leaders of the tyrannies are told they are tyrants oppressing their peoples and speak only for themselves individually and their ruling cliques, with the implication that the more the tyrants attempt to assert their interests in the world and provoke arguments of entitlement and proprieties of conduct with the democracies, the more the allegations of tyranny against them will dominate global international news and diplomatic discussion, and the more disaffection with tyranny and its leaders will be likely to penetrate to their oppressed peoples, destabilising their states. 

The implications of the democratic elites acting in their own interests to maintain the viability of the authoritarian states of the world and their threats to democracy and its peoples are clearly many. The elites present as traitors to their nations and peoples; they pursue self-interest at the cost of the interests of their people. They will be seen by many in this optic as no better than Xi, Putin, or any of the other jumped-up bingles who rule dictatorially over nations. The question might well be asked how much worse these tyrants are than the leadershipping individuals prolific in our own society, down through our institutions whose heads rule them for themselves and not the people as a whole, and in the analysis here how much worse than the leaders of every cult and movement which has answered the call of the ruling elites that the society is under no circumstances from outlawing  discrimination in the 1970s, to progress by calm fraternal reason to rule by an equal people. The contemporary movement to reracialise the society, as Greg Sheridan put it in The Australian,  and generally reprejudice the society against women and minorities, because these divisions provide leadership opportunities, dramatic media conflict, ideological voter base political support, the popular fragmentation of identity politics which postmodernism has always embraced as counter-Enlightenment division to destroy democracy, is summarised above, and covered in more detail Towards Democracy. Every younger generation wants its radicalism, but the  elites don't want it to be an even more militant demand for peace and equality. The demonstrations of the social revolution were great media. Let's recreate discrimination so we can run them again, and redivide the people. Woke from the dead. 

The people, unorganised, the fundamental democratic institution that isn't, appear bewildered and helpless, with perhaps the  exception that a third to half of them united in the unprecedented phenomenon of love of a political figure, Trump, which had a clear implication of love of each other, the patriots of Twitter. And further in the spirit of not airily writing the people off as helpless, the reaction against the woke offendedness industry, against the confected "racism" and sexism special pleading, and the like, has firmly set in, led, as a reaction against postmodernist unreason was always likely to be, by our comedians. The cartoon I posted on Facebook the other day was captioned 

"Sorry Arthur, your answer was actually correct, but Paul shouted his opinion louder so he gets the point. And an extra bonus point goes to Sue as she was offended by your answer."  (Jakoater - very small writing)

This is all over Twitter and Tik Tok.  Despite President Biden's tweeted election commitment to use the presidential executive power against "hate", there is no clear evidence of this or other state control of how people feel, though the media is largely Democrat. The question of whether the US is now a soft fascist state remains open, for all my tweeted concerns and other commentary to that effect. It may be that the crucial issue for the next stage of democracy is with the people themselves, individually. The comedians are after all just leaders, in the same celebrity mould as all of us are conditioned in, however much they support reason and thus the people, not least by the democratic reasoning that only rulers are free. How many of us, and of course I include myself, are guided by our hearts in what I suppose is the capitalist model imposed on civic attitudes, of rising to be our own little tin rajah competitively besting everyone else to dominate our own little cult, replacing the individual quest for harmonised collective power that enables our rule with the individualistic self-promotion that existentially stunts our lives? Foucault, an eminent poststructuralist, might well ask the following in his Preface to Anti-Oedipus:

"How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our behaviour?" (Quoted in Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason, p 153)   

Postmodernists would rightly agonise over that, if they didn't want to be fascists, and the followers of postmodernism might with complete justification have similar concerns if they didn't see themselves as fascists. But how far should all of us ask ourselves whether this concern isn't basically a human one, "primitively human" we could say, except that some of the few societies that have answered it are thought of as "primitive". Better say "instinctively human". 

It is however to our leaders that this international  consideration must be mainly addressed, "leaders" meaning both the Democrat and the Republican parties, both of whom I identify with the ruling wealth that pays for them. They cannot engage in the moral diplomacy of criticising tyranny's oppression of its people compared to democracy's free ruling people, because they have neither confidence nor credibility in that position. They know, and this applies to what even the best of the Congress members know of the system as a whole, that they rule for themselves and not the people, themselves meaning for their wealthy paymasters, for  their party, as attractive to financial supporters by its achievement of government and its preselection of them as its candidate, and perhaps above all themselves as as the occupants of prestigious positions that are legitimately or corruptly highly remunerative. This problem of credibility is probably best illustrated by the democratic alternative described in Towards Democracy of government significantly through election policy platforms mandated by the people under Voter Policy Mandate in a policy development and implementation dialogue between genuine popular representatives and the people mediated by an institutionally redefined media. That would be representatives whose election costs were paid by the people so the people could own them. Good old capitalism. Democracy's nominal leaders in Congress and the presidency do not want their ruling self-service ahead of the people's interest exposed in international diplomatic wrangling. Their wealthy owners do not want their ownership of politics exposed, nor the reality of supposedly democratic society exposed, where the poorer fifty percent of the American people own 2% of the national wealth. With Chairman Xi telling the rich in China to "repay society", the question of how soon material inequality was less in China than in the US would become a global talking point, all the more if it is less already. Nothing is more certain than that a Western moral critique of totalitarianism's oppression of its people would be exposed as hypocrisy by a counter-critique of fake US and Western democracy by China, Russia, and the other dictatorships. What I know, and the narrative here that reflects it, what analysts all over the world say consistent with that narrative, and perhaps above all what so many Australian citizens say about the reality of politics, not to mention the Americans, British and other citizens of the West on Twitter, is all too well known to Xi and Putin. 

   

 

We can glance back quickly at Global Trends at this point in relation to the world it presents looking ridiculous, though noting as usual that Global Trends may be aware of this. Congress doesn't want to be presented with a briefing that factors in a US different from the existing one, especially one in which  Congress' rule  and the President's radically shifts to collaboration with an equal people. The point has already been made here that US promotion of democracy in the world was bound to stumble from the US' not being ruled by the people, with Global Trends quoting some analysts saying that the best way to promote democracy abroad would be to improve it at home. But the expansion of this that the US can't preach to authoritarians for fear of exposing its own elite oligarchical rule and inequality reduces perhaps 25% of Global Trends to incoherence. At the numerous points where Global Trends refers to how authoritarians "may be engaging in various activities that have negative impacts on democracy internationally", we realise, perhaps astonished, that we hear more from the authoritarians about the justice of their own international conduct than we hear from the democracies. 

photo by heather-mount

Global Trends notes that

"Both China and Russia in particular actively emphasise norms of state sovereignty and 'non-interference' in international relations." (p 14)

Australia has recently had to cancel the visa of one Chinese academic and join the US and others in protest against Chinese cyber hacking. The Chinese response is

"The United States ganged up with its allies to make unwarranted accusations against Chinese cybersecurity. 

"This was made up out of thin air and confused right and wrong. 

"China will never accept this." (ABC News 20 July 2021)

Russia seems to have been similarly accused of cyberattacks on the United States. State sovereignty and non-interference. The people of Tibet, the nations who send ships through the international waters of the South China Sea, the people of Hong Kong, the people of Taiwan, the people of Georgia, Chechnya, the Crimea, East Ukraine, are all going to be relieved to hear of Chinese and Russian respect for state sovereignty and non-interference. I don't think Global Trends mentions these cases of the marine and territorial expansionism of China and Russia. It mentions the historical doctrine that peace in the world is best guaranteed by democracy, on the logic that peoples who are already free don't need to go to war, at least with each other. It goes back to President Woodrow Wilson in 1917 entering World War I arguing

"a steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations". (p 6)

That doctrine of the peaceful democratic world probably is sound, but it has clear implications that Global Trends doesn't address. It implies a democratic world, the spread of democracy throughout the world being a condition of world peace. And it implies conversely that totalitarian states are in their nature subject to a compulsion to expand and engage in conquest by war or other means. With China, with Russia, with Hitler and Mussolini and the USSR and the Germany of WWI we see this illustrated. The loyalty of peoples who do not rule and are not free to their dictators must be won by the glories of national greatness and conquest, and the corresponding unification against an enemy. 

The fascist state is therefor always in its nature a danger to peace. But instead of contact with this subtly implied reality, what we hear from Global Trends is a deafening silence, the same deafening silence that we hear from our leaders in international diplomacy. Why is it not openly said in international diplomacy that of course China and Russia must seek international power for their ruling cliques by whatever illicit means they can, because their leaders live in constant fear of being overthrown by the appeal of democracy to their people? That of course they must have conquest and expansion to report to their nation? Global Trends hints at this with statements like 

"The foreign policy actions of .. authoritarian governments such as Russia and Iran may be shaped by regime threat concerns." (P 14)

Really? It then goes on to say

"In general, to date there is more evidence that some authoritarian governments may hope to 'contain' the spread of democracy because of its potential threat to their own regime stability than there is of broad affirmative agendas to promote authoritarianism." (P 14) 

So not only do we have the obvious stated about the defensive motives of tyranny, but there is an apparent sigh of relief that the authoritarians aren't running around successfully promoting tyranny over freedom. This in the report that assures us that democracy is in theory unassailable at 78% support despite that support being understated in principle from being pulled down by dissatisfaction in practice. What world, we wonder, are we living in where we can repeatedly note in this briefing to Congress that authoritarians don't seem to be promoting tyranny and its oppression as preferable to democracy and its freedom? 

The answer appears to be, "A world where the superior appeal of democracy can't be spelled out because there are too many skeletons in democracy's closet". It's hard to think of another reason why the superior appeal of democracy wouldn't be taken for granted - another reason than that it isn't democracy, and that it isn't freedom, and that our leaders know that and don't want to make it the subject of global polemical exposure. Putin goes on about attempts to promote democracy not cutting across traditional Russian values, Xi about respect for civilizational diversity. Sounds fair. So why not give China and Russia each a national television station in the United States, and the US a national channel in China and Russia, and we'll see whether civilizational diversity and traditional values, or freedom and democracy, prove more appealing? We know why not. WE can't dwell longer on this, except to say that when Global Trends starts to talk about the totalitarians maintaining their rule through softer fascism, it gets still more embarrassing. Interpreting the democratic decline, Global Trends notes: 

" ... the aspects of democracy relating to political competition and electoral processes appear to have suffered relatively modest declines as compared to the broader rights and institutions that are associated with well-functioning ,and truly 'free' liberal democratic political systems, such as free and independent media, freedom of expression, freedom of association, and the rule of law. A potential explanation is that some governments may be inclined to focus on improving 'what shows' such as elections  ...

" ... 'democratic backsliding' has over time become less overt and more incremental, consisting for instance of censorship and media restrictions, relatively subtle tactics to tilt the electoral playing field, or engineered deteriorations in judicial independence, as opposed to outright electoral fraud and sudden executive power grabs." (p 12)

How the United States could preach to democratically declining nations and dictatorships about the virtues of democracy on those grounds defies imagination. 

I should finally in this glance at the democracies' diplomatic timidity consider China's economic blackmailing of other nations into silence, even though just to state that question answers it. China doesn't make deals for other nations: what they lose from broken deals, it loses. The West is already belatedly realising the need for greater economic independence from China, and of course the whole idea of being political slaves to China's economic power is ludicrous. It is an idea that may only ever have come to be taken seriously because it stems from capitalists whingeing about their super profits. In any frank and honest diplomatic dialogue, economic blackmail should be counterproductive for China, being answered by the point that its economic growth is essentially built on slave labour of its oppressed people. But how could the US say that with its corporations outsourcing production off-shore to Third World nations?  How could Australia say it, no longer having a car industry? That and how many other cheap overseas labour matters?  What the West's political deference to the economic strength of the tyrannies has done is enable tyranny to grow economically stronger and tyrants to consolidate their power, selling out the security of the democratic peoples' freedom from tyranny to capitalist profiteering. Meanwhile, in Australia, the government is at last report reviewing its lease of Port Darwin to a Chinese company for 99 years. That would be more small government with its laissez-faire economics. The democratic governments have economically piggybacked on political tyranny to serve their own and their paymasters' purposes at the expense of their peoples' national security. Not to mention throwing the democracy activists in the dictatorships to the wolves. Now, with rigor mortis hardly having set in on Hong Kong democracy, we have President Biden talking about a war the US doesn't want with China, an emboldened China, over Taiwan. 

Reflection on this diplomatic reticence of the democracies reveals a more fundamental problem for their leaders. The criticism of dictatorial regimes as oppressors of their people is an appeal on behalf of their people over the heads, as it were, of the regime. It raises the vision of the common peoples of the world being united in ruling their nations. That is precisely what the leaders of the Western nations, the so-called democracies, do not want. They want their own oligarchical elite rule to continue. So it goes beyond the question of democratic leaders not being able to throw stones because they live in glass houses. They live in the same house as the totalitarian leaders, all, as we say, in the same houseboat. This is a perspective, merely an Enlightenment perspective, in which we can see that all leadership as it exists now is an exploitative imposition on the common people. The ordinary people of the world are not divided into hostile camps. Arabs do not hate Jews. Muslims are 17.8% of the Israeli population. Hindus and Muslims don't hate each other. There are some 213 million Muslims in India, 15.5% of the population, who have lived harmoniously for decades, at least, almost certainly centuries, with Hindus. The trouble between these faiths arises because leadershippers, religious and political, seize on the homicidally psychopathic acts of a fanatic or two and magnify them, the media all too willing to do their job for them, into mass general hostility between the faiths to establish and shore up their leadership positions, in their interests and their paymasters'. They can do this easily enough because the peoples do not have the respect for each other of being rulers in common of their societies, the respect which will override religious differences with common, equal civic status and purpose. This is the device by which the US media tries to sow hatred between blacks and whites, or between whites and every other skin colour, trans people and the nation, women and men, the device by which Aboriginal leadershippers in Australia in the 21st century try to sustain skin colour and cultural antipathy, including by calling it "racial". That these groups are enemies is a lie. That "China" and "America" are enemies is a lie. The Chinese and American people are kinfolk, as are the Chinese and Australian people, as ten minutes stroll up Sydney's Pitt Street from Hay St to Goulburn St will confirm. Check out Meilili8 on Tik Tok. Music by Taylor Swift (orange traditional costume on skateboard), Lewis Capaldi (Black and gold on skateboard) Sam Smith (both in white). Welcome to China. All the peoples of the world are divided into these defensive national and ethnic groups by virtue of their impotence in ruling and the associated myth that they need their rulers to lead them against competing groups.  It is as Woodrow Wilson said in 1917 and a string of presidents have repeated, documented in Global Trends, that if all the world were democracies, expanded here to real democracies ruled by their people, there would be global peace. The democratic peace. Or, the Enlightenment vision of universal humanity. 

So we can see that the idea that the US can't attack Chinese and Russian oppression for fear of drawing attention to its own can be turned around, reconfigured. That is the proposition that their leaderships are hand in glove, little different from each other, playing the same game. It looks like a book could be written about this, a world order which is fake because the people nowhere rule. But no book here, because this launch section is coming to an end, and was only supposed to be about the durability of parliamentary democracy. Apart from the point that democracy is fake because the people don't rule, the point now emerges that its leaders have endangered it by their tacit compliance in the growth and empowerment of the enemies of parliamentary democracy. That everyone is in the same boat is even illustrated by the need for enemies to unite the people against external threat which I have attributed to the tyrannies being no less, in principle, a need of the democratic nations. With the United States now falling apart in political division, there is no reason to doubt that the threat of the common American enemy, China, and Russia, is being used to hold the US together in support of its government. Incidentally, it is even interesting that Trump, unique in his being loved by his people, uniquely suspicious of their government and politics, seemed also to have little time for many democratic leaders, seeming at times to view them with little less favour than Putin and Xi. But there is no point talking about what may be only instinct that was never consciously articulated. But never underestimate how much complexity the simplicity of instinct can encompass.  

The point of interest about the common character of more and less undemocratic leaderships is their motivations. In the US, its World no 1 614 billionaires, economic inequality, and wealth dominance of government makes it clear enough that the motive is money, capitalist profit. That, indisputably I'd have thought, is driving the whole thing. That is what is endangered by popular rule, by the people taking over from the wealthy the power of government. An equal popular political power, as argued in Towards Democracy, will reduce wealth inequality, restoring capitalism to its classical Enlightenment societally beneficial form, with the moral context in which Adam Smith saw it supplied by democratic religion. That inequality and the popular political impotence on which it rests is the mainspring of the deal with China and Russia: we won't mention your oppression if you don't mention our inequality. That inequality is too much like oppression. But in China, funnily enough, the situation doesn't seem very different. China, World Population Review tells us, is No 2 for billionaires, with 388. So there is a lot of money in China telling Chairman Xi and the CCP to keep the people oppressed so they'll have to keep working for slave wages, raise their standard of living enough to keep them happy, and don't worry about the US, because they're really little different from us. Oh, and, maintain a healthy animosity between ourselves and the US, because that's the way to unite the Chinese people with loyalty to the government against the er capitalist enemy. Keep the nations divided and hostile, because that's essential to stop the common peoples coming together in the realisation that they aren't enemies at all, but universal brothers and sisters, who neither need to hate each other or be ruled by leaders. Everything's fine as it is. Xi and Putin will of course be in the kleptocratic tradition of leaders generally, socking away billions in public money, bribes and other insider knowledge in the family's secret account somewhere. I think it's safe to say this self-enrichment is the overwhelming dominant motive for entering politics in the world. We can speculate about power just for its own sake, but a few billion dollars thrown in gives it extra point. As for love of their people, why don't they set them free? 

In coming to the final consideration here, I should say that I don't think it's intrinsic to this analysis that the existing nations need to be abolished. 8 billion people need organising somehow, in collaboration with people they elect who have some affinity with them, though that really doesn't need to go beyond being human. I did kid around on Facebook the other day about Australia and Taiwan and so on  becoming states of the US, but I think that was only defensively in relation to China. As long as all the nations are proper democracies, I'd imagine they could stay as they are. But I think the final thing we have to look at is the military and its role in the process we are trying to understand of the forces which drive our society and world. I'll bit the bullet and start with President Biden's statement of the last few days as at 29 October 2021 about a war we- the US - doesn't want with China over Taiwan. And let me immediately say I would support the US defence of Taiwan against China as things stand. But at the same time we must remember that the Chinese threat here is from a China emboldened by the fact that its diplomatic rhetorical posturing of recent decades has not been countered by loud US assertion that Chinese "civilizational diversity" would be for Taiwan the replacement of such democratic freedoms as its people have with Tyranny's oppression of them. And we can now understand that what has prevented this assertion happening is the leaderships' deal. You scratch my billionaires' back....  

The next ball we have to keep in the air here is that the military will not like this accusing US and Western response to China and the other fascists. This is ultimately the language of friendship between the peoples, the friendship which bypasses the leaders' need for enmity between the peoples to rally support for their leaders, so their leaders can continue to rule and oppress them, more or less depending in China and the dictatorships or the US and the West. Moral diplomacy is very much an alternative to war, and it is seen as fundamental here that Biden's crocodile tears about a war come as if from a moral rhetorical vacuum; suddenly, with most of the rhetoric on the issue being about Taiwan being part of One China, we are on the brink of war. And it hardly needs be said, though I'll say it anyway, that I fully support the efforts of our fighting men and women who sacrifice themselves in war for our freedom. All CODE opposes here is their being sent overseas to be killed and wounded in various ways so people at home can make billions of dollars through their rule over their peoples. So another ball is that we are talking in the first instance about the military-industrial complex, that President General Eisenhower warned us of. War puts billions of dollars - it's actually trillions now - in the pockets of the manufacturers of military equipment and other folk employed in supporting military action. Imagine if the peoples were friends so that  that money could be spend on their well-being. Or, to go back to that terrible social revolution of the 20th century

"Imagine there's no countries, I wonder if you can, nothing to kill or die for, a brotherhood of man" (John Lennon)

But no, let's not imagine that. That would be too easy. And the expense is not just on actual warfare. Trillions will have been spent on ballistic missiles, their silos, and the technology associated with the United States nuclear arsenal, in preparedness for war which has so far not occurred. It's possible that most military expenditure is deterrent, as in never used in combat, under present arrangements. 

.

I think trying to theoretically separate the military and wealth as the driving agents of society is difficult. That's presumably why they talk about a military-industrial complex .It looks like the chicken and the egg , where either industry's demand for profit drives the military to war, or the military demand for was serves industry's profit. We see odd cases like the militaristic tradition of the old Prussia and think no, it really is the military tail wagging the dog of state. And there are plenty of cases like Caesar conquering Gaul so he rules Rome. Napoleon becoming Emperor because of his generalship. Alexander conquering most of his known world and ruling Macedon. So it might be possible to make a case that it is armies and their commanders who are the real driving force of history. The military is, we must not forget, ultimately the most powerful force in society. While the American people are heavily armed, I'm not sure they could defeat the military in battle. The real question there is whether the US military would attack the American people, in the service of fascism, as it would be, by definition.  

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But militarism as an autonomous driving force is qualified in relation to Napoleon, whose first purpose is recognised as the political one of consolidating the French Revolution. It seems Bismarck's celebrated statesmanship on behalf of militarist Prussia might have been better applied to adopting liberal democracy, as some advised him. Hitler was first the political leader of Nazi Germany, his military in its service, while the military in Britain had exercised no driving force for war, the nation being dismally underprepared. So today especially, the military does not achieve leadership of the state, but serves its leadership, even though military individuals like General Eisenhower may get to lead the state, but as President, not General. 

Having opened this futuristic speculation at some length, I must close it in the context of this launch, and specifically in the context of moral diplomacy. The world, with its nations, bogus leaderships and military, presents as a jungle, the "law of the jungle" jungle which was replaced by the Social Contract of civil society in relation to particular societies in their nations. The methods of resolving differences between the nations, the democratic nations and the authoritarians in particular, are the methods of the jungle, military force, not the methods of democratic civil society discussion with reasoned appeal to common humanity. Propaganda is more likely to depict enemies emotionally as monsters. This appears to be because the nations are led by these leaders whose interest is not in their peoples leading their nations as democracy would indicate, but in themselves leading the nations, in the service not only of themselves but of their wealthy paymasters, leading their nations as military forces because their paymasters make billions from military preparedness and war. All this is over the heads of the ordinary people, who are not mutual enemies at all, but in reality are able to get along well despite the efforts of national leadershippers to rally popular support against these imagined popular enemies in other countries, and despite the media's love of conflict and aversion to quiet, peacefully reasoning society and a world similarly modelled. The United Nations is made up of leaderships, so it won't do anything, all the more because the UN seems to be dominated by authoritarian regimes who would fear friendship between their people and the people of democracy because it would expose their oppressed people to freedom, all the more if the democracies were real democracies of ruling people. 

The military, again, will be averse to this moral diplomacy and its appeal to ordinary people over authoritarian leaders' heads. By the military I of course mean the institution, its leadership, not the men and women sent overseas to die, who won't be averse to friendship between peoples at all. That would be why in European wars, where the combatants had common language, fraternising with the enemy was a common problem for commanders. But, in a nutshell, there is still the question of whether wealth, its leadershipping minions, with their media, political parties, and protofascist postmodernist philosophy of critical theory, the military, and other potentially authoritarian forces in the democratic societies as they are, would step aside in acceding first to popular demands for the people to rule the democracy, and, that achieved, for an international diplomatic order in which the democracies addressed themselves to the peoples of authoritarian nations in terms of the benefits of freedom in democracies the people actually ruled and were free in. Would a global Social Contract between peoples not be a better world? 

In the minds of the wealth elite powers, evidently not. And there are no end of people, whether I'm one or not, who will exclaim that the idea of the wealthy quietly trading their potential trillions for billions by letting a civically equal people pare back inequality in the society and start to erode the profits of war with a global Societal Contract is absurd. Aren't their lives run by a conviction that more money is always better than less money? Why on Earth wouldn't they just tell their military to take over? Apart from the fact that the  generals might agree, but the soldiers on the ground who actually have to pull the trigger on their fellow citizens might not, no reason? Or could there be the further consideration that trying to enrich yourself by hundreds of billions of dollars through democratic political or criminal corruption or sending people to their deaths in war while 50% of your nation owns 2% of the national wealth is a lot of pointless rubbish, not even classic capitalism with its societal responsibility, but a perversion of it? Or maybe even that the appeal to common humanity includes, believe it or not, capitalists? 

I am going to want to sound these hopeful notes, but we must remember that democracy is currently declining. Global Trends notes experts saying:

" ... a comparable third such 'reverse wave' has not yet manifested itself". (p 13)

All this discussion has the dimension of our not knowing how long we have to take corrective action before the process of democratic decline becomes irreversible, the democratic "tipping point". We have to be realistic. It is all very well to regard Putin, Xi, Erdogan, and their ilk as megalomaniacs apparently personally driven by power for its own sake and the theft of public fortunes to establish family dynasties or whatever it is they want to do, paying off their military to support them, and further assisted by their secret weapon of boring to death cynical observers of their antics. We haven't even bothered with the military takeovers of democracies in places like Burma and Egypt, except to note that Global Trends suggests they are common enough. But that individuals of totalitarian mentality could not exist and rise to power in the US and other democracies seems complacent or naive. I think rather than repeat my list of concerns about growing soft fascism in the US I'll repeat Global Trends' concerns about creeping control by authoritarian regimes, where things like political competition and election processes don't seem to have suffered as much as free and independent media, freedom of expression, freedom of association and the rule of law. So we're looking at censorship and media restrictions, relatively subtle tactics to tilt the electoral playing field, or deterioration in judicial independence as opposed to outright electoral fraud ... You don't say. But I do remember tweeting an addition to my usual list of soft fascism worries: that I forgot to include the Milleytary. 

I was referring to General Mark Milley. Predictably, the neutrality of the military as to political party is seen as another democratic cornerstone, on the basis that whoever the people elect should have constitutional command of the military regardless of party. That as usual seems to mean "Whoever they elect except Trump" General Milley is US military Chief of Staff, the head of the US military. Trump appointee from 2019, and apparently not a wise appointment by Trump, Milley has followed his declarations of the military not wanting to appear too close to the then constitutional Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces - the President, Trump - by public statements and behaviour of a woke Democrat partisan. I was actually wondering about "freedom of assembly" in the earlier list I borrowed from Global Trends, till I remembered that protest and riot in 48 US cities is OK, but number 49 isn't, even if its being at the Capitol makes it about the only one to have a clear political point rather than just being about a hatred of America generally. For the leadershipping elites, discrediting the protest at the Capitol on January 6 2021 is a near-mortal imperative, the turning of a blade from their hearts. Milley is a vehement CNNsurrectionist, who certainly wouldn't like a demonstration directed against the leadershippers of America in Congress and in support of Trump. A demonstration that couldn't be repeated, despite freedom of assembly. Whether Milley saw worrying signs of popular rule in Promises Made Promises Kept, fake media and Drain the Swamp, or was alarmed by Trump's "isolationist" policy of withdrawing troops from Syria and other arenas of war, promising to withdraw also from Afghanistan, and seriously questioning aspects of US NATO involvement, I have no idea. But I cannot believe that Milley floundering around in party politics is just the mark of a fool. It looks more like Milley would like to follow in Eisenhower's footsteps and be president, but a Democrat president, not that being a fool would on present indications stop him from being that. President Biden is reportedly at 38% approval on the surveys, insofar as they are reliable, so if you subtract the people who are embarrassed or guilty at having voted for him, who knows where he is. Milley described Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal as a "logistical success and a strategic failure", by which mumbo jumbo he appears to be repeating the Biden line that that the airlift was such a success that it made up for the democratic regime collapsing before the Taliban and the US losing the war. Like the great job they did with the lifeboats on the Titanic. I mustn't go on about Milley, except to say that the roughly half of America who oppose Biden and the Democrats and support Trump - we can't really say generally "Trump and the Republicans" - now have unmistakeable indications that the US military opposes them. Like anyone would be intimidated by that. It's a free country!  


In concluding this section on the decline of parliamentary democracy in 2021, I remain optimistic, but I must be realistic. My optimism goes back to the first section of this launch, about achieving democracy being relatively easy, in that by developing Promises Made Promises Kept into Voter Policy Mandate, the beginnings of popular rule can be achieved. With the right people-party collaboration, policy from the people to the parties will soon follow. The parliamentary democracy of popular rule will survive and thrive, turning around the democratic decline. This is hardly overnight stuff. It's envisaged that we'd have to get to civic equality as the basis of of greater material equality. And I don't think I've understated the dangers and obstacles here. Realistically, the forces that have acted to undermine the people's confidence in their ability to rule, and undermine that ability, have been huge, as Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death reminds us. Nor must we forget that the current division of the people is devoted at the same time to putting them down; every minority they discriminate against is a victim of the people's benighted moral unworthiness.  

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What institution of the people? Indeed, all the defects of society from hate down are the result of government by the people, somehow starting when they voted for equality by by outlawing discrimination fifty years ago. That had to be turned around, so we could rerun it like it never happened. And seriously, Voter Policy Mandate does allow for a gradual popular uptake. They haven't destroyed everyone's confidence or ability, and Americans are going to wonder why they couldn't rule the democracy today when 250 years ago they were probably the most literate people on Earth, as Postman describes. Perhaps far more important, as the common people of America experience the dignifying existential elevation of rule, that will promote their identification with the common peoples of China, Russia and the other tyrannies, seeing them as kinfolk to be respected as likewise rightful rulers.

Hopefully, once the processes here are grasped, and seen as necessary to freedom, including the freedom of free enterprise, the elites will decide to just get on with them rather than have to be dragged kicking and screaming every inch of the way. They're sensible folk, so I can't really see a problem, and we should be able to get the ol' whirly worl' going around OK. 

The hard part comes in the next section, the individual disciplines needed to keep the world going round OK. Price of liberty ....

Stan Heuston

31st October 2021